Cooper Hewitt's 2017 National Design Awards winners announced

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced the winners of the 2017 National Design Awards, which recognize excellence and innovation in design in 11 categories.

The program, now in its 18th year, “celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement,” according to the museum’s website.

The lifetime achievement award was given to Hartmut Esslinger, the German-American industrial designer behind Frog Design and the “Snow White design language” of early Apple computers.

Susan S. Szenasy, the publisher and editor in chief of Metropolis magazine, won the Director’s Award, while the award for Design Mind went to Craig L. Wilkins, an architect, academic, author, and one of the country’s leading scholars on African Americans in architecture.

Other recipients include Mass Design Group, the Boston-based design collaborative and 2015 Curbed Groundbreaker, which won the architecture design award, and Deborah Berke Partners, which received the award for interior design (and whose principal was a judge on Curbed’s 2016 Groundbreakers panel).

Rounding out the list of winners are Design Trust for Public Space, for the Corporate & Institutional Achievement award; Jennifer Morla, for communication design; Slow and Steady Wins the Race,for fashion design; Stamen Design, for interaction design; Surfacedesign, for landscape architecture; and Joe Doucet, for product design.

To learn more about each recipient and see examples of their work, head over to Cooper Hewitt.

Photo via Cooper Hewitt