Michael Maltzan, TERREMOTO, and others celebrated at the 25th annual Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards

The 25th edition of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum's annual National Design Awards program has named ten winners, each representing the "empowering, inclusive and diverse" nature of design practices in their respective fields.

The program was established in 2000 as part of the White House Millennium Council and honors the best of the best American designers making impacts in the public sphere in multiple disciplines and across ten separate awards categories. Maurice Cox, who served as the Chair for this year's jury, stated he was "proud that the winners are increasingly a reflection of who we are in America and who we hope to be." 

“Design touches all aspects of our lives every single day—from the buildings we live, learn and work in, to the physical and digital systems that deliver our basic services, the clothes we wear, the spaces we gather in or the creativity and beauty that help us understand ourselves as a nation—and yet design’s undeniable influence can go unseen," adds the Cooper Hewitt's director Maria Nicanor. "This year, we recognize 2025’s exceptional winners, but also the hundreds of past winners and jury members who form the vast network of thinkers and practitioners actively shaping our everyday.”

Below you'll find a closer look at what made this year's awardees so special.

Architecture: Michael Maltzan Architecture

Jury comment: "Founded in 1995, Michael Maltzan Architecture is a Los Angeles-based architecture practice whose work spans affordable housing, innovative urban infrastructure and cross-disciplinary educational spaces. The firm’s practice is rooted in a deep belief in architecture’s capacity to create new physical, cultural and social connections, and the firm’s groundbreaking work is often located in challenging locations. Sometimes the work is intended to point to a different future for an organization, a community or an individual. Notable projects include Inner City Arts, a multiphase youth arts center in the heart of Skid Row; Star Apartments, a first-of-its-kind prefabricated construction; and the Los Angeles Sixth Street Viaduct, which radically reimagines infrastructure as civic amenity in the contemporary city."

Design Visionary: Kim Hastreiter

Jury comment: "Hastreiter is an artist and a multihyphenate communicator who shares ideas and discoveries in many mediums: art, zines, books, social media and podcasts. A cultural anthropologist, Hastreiter has made a great impact by forecasting cultural movements, talents and trends and by collaborating with the art and design community to make big ideas happen. She cofounded PAPER magazine, where she was creative director, curator, editor, publisher and writer; she covered the fields of design, art, fashion and pop culture until the magazine was sold in 2017. Hastreiter works to bring culture to life with projects ranging from a 17-year collaboration with Target on its Design for All partnerships with well-known and emerging designers to conceptual pop-up “department stores” in Los Angeles, New York and Miami. In these projects, she examines the relationships among art, commerce and culture—currently, with a series of zines that document and commemorate the fleeting digital commentary made by artists via memes. She is also an avid collector, and her newest book, STUFF (A New York Life of Cultural Chaos), which launches in the spring of 2025, is both a memoir and a history book that is told through the stories of her material goods."

Climate Action: ilumiNACIÓN by Resilient Power Puerto Rico

Jury comment: "Developed by the nonprofit organization Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR), ilumiNACIÓN is a web-based platform designed to drive equitable and sustainable climate solutions while strengthening communities’ capacity to respond, rebuild and prosper after extreme climate events. RPPR was formed in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria and works to increase uninterrupted access to decentralized distributed renewable energy for marginalized groups and communities; for example, by co-developing 44 solar energy systems and providing technical assistance to dozens of community-based organizations. ilumiNACIÓN will include an energy calculator, data collection tools and a georeferenced climate vulnerability tool, all aimed at generating actionable information for communities to document their energy and climate needs and participate in optimizing energy efficiency, solar energy adoption and resilience initiatives. The platform’s design was led by RPPR’s executive director, Alejandra Castrodad-Rodríguez, in collaboration with Victor Cuadrado Landrau and Gustavo Castrodad Rodríguez."

Emerging Designer: Nu Goteh

Jury comment: "Goteh is a designer, strategist and educator who envisions design as a tool for communities to reclaim their futures. As founder and principal of Room for Magic and co-founder, managing partner and creative director of Deem Journal, Goteh is at the forefront of an emerging generation of designers who integrate design, culture, art, community and social practice. Through Deem’s global platform, which has expanded beyond the print journal to include experiential activations and digital content, Goteh works to create a more inclusive future by examining design as a process instead of as output. His community-centric studio practice, Room for Magic, brings together marketing, storytelling, creative direction and human-centered design for clients such as the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, the World Peace Foundation, the National Memorial for the Underground Railroad and the Urban Civil Rights Museum, as well as for brands like Jordan and Headspace. Influenced by his Liberian heritage and passion for counterculture, Goteh is a global voice for design as a social practice."

Fashion Design: Melitta Baumeister

Jury comment: "Melitta Baumeister is an independent brand and maker of expressively unique wearable garments that reject trends, body standards and beauty ideals. Based on a futuristic, minimalist aesthetic, the brand’s clothing often exaggerates volume and creates sculptural silhouettes, using innovative techniques and materials to infuse the surprising, the mysterious and the humorous of the everyday. Baumeister’s designs are intended to impact not only the wearer, but also the space around them. The brand is led by Melitta Baumeister, a German-born fashion designer now based in New York, who received her Master of Fine Arts in fashion design at Parsons The New School. She works closely with her partner, Michal Plata, who brings an interdisciplinary perspective shaped by his previous experience as a car and context designer at BMW Advanced Design. Their synergy blends artistic experimentation with conceptual rigor."

Interior Design: Little Wing Lee

Jury comment: "Lee is an interior designer known for her sharp eye for color, texture and materiality, along with her thoughtful and narrative-driven approach to design. In 2019, she started Studio & Projects, whose work spans cultural institutions, commercial environments, public and private hospitality spaces, intimate residences and products. Driven by human experience, compelling narratives and the profound power of beauty, Studio & Projects explores design as a holistic exercise by drawing upon the expertise of a diverse range of collaborators. Lee also founded Black Folks in Design, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to bring awareness to and promote the cultural contributions, excellence and importance of Black designers."

Product Design: Jules Sherman

Jury comment: "Sherman is a leader in pediatric medical device design and health-care innovation. Inspired by a traumatic hospital birth experience in 2010, she turned her focus from consumer product design to transforming pediatric and maternal health care through FDA-cleared devices that prioritize safety and efficacy. As director of the Biodesign Program at Children’s National Hospital, Sherman collaborates with clinicians, engineers and families to develop innovative devices and teaches design-thinking methodology for medical device development to nurses and students. Her work includes products like Trach Sense, which detects tracheostomy complications; the Kangarobe, which improves skin-to-skin care in neonatal ICUs; Primo-Lacto, a closed system for colostrum collection; and NOOMA Tech, which facilitates delayed cord clamping for preterm infants. In her role as adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, Sherman mentors engineering students and contributes to academic research."

Communication Design: Matt Willey

Jury comment: "Willey is a graphic designer. He joined Pentagram as a partner in 2020 after five years as the art director of The New York Times Magazine. Willey has worked with several of the leading titles in independent publishing, including Port, Elephant, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review and the UK newspaper The Independent. In 2021, he redesigned The Big Issue, the largest street magazine in the world. He is currently the creative director and co-founder of the annual literary magazine INQUE. Willey has developed branding systems and title sequences for a wide range of clients, including the design of the titles for the award-winning BBC series Killing Eve. A consistent thread throughout Willey’s work is the incorporation of custom-drawn typefaces, which he draws for the specific contexts of the brands, publications and stories in which they appear. Willey donates the proceeds of several of his typefaces to charity. He has helped raise more than $150,000 for Cancer Research UK and for Macmillan Cancer Support through the BuyFontsSaveLives initiative."

Landscape Architecture: TERREMOTO

Jury comment: "TERREMOTO is a landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. David Godshall and Alain Peauroi founded the firm in 2012 with the intention of building gardens and landscapes that were explorations and investigations into ideas and culture. TERREMOTO creates well-built site-specific landscapes that respond to client needs while challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials and formal conventions. The studio’s design approach is to create “omni-positive gardens and landscapes that are fair, just and generous in their relationships to labor, materials and ecology.” The firm’s portfolio includes a diverse range of projects with various scales and typologies; one such project involves gardens that respond to the needs of all."

Digital Design: Emerging Objects

Jury comment: "Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, founders of Emerging Objects, specialize in innovations in 3D printing architecture, products, software, hardware and materials. They view themselves as digital alchemists, material scientists and cooks, saying they see themselves “inventing recipes that allow us to ask questions about the future of the digital world through the lens of 3D printing.” They digitally design 3D-printed environments and objects for the 21st century, in the process creating new biodigital materials from items in the waste stream such as sawdust, coffee grounds and rubber tires, and they examine how traditional materials can be transformed into digital materials of tomorrow using local and Indigenous materials such as wildfire ash, earth and salt. Rael and San Fratello are also professors at public universities who bring digital design and fabrication to thousands of students"