National Design Awards 2026: Ten Winners

Every year the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on Manhattan's Museum Mile names the winners of the National Design Awards, and the 2026 list reads like a map of where design is heading: mass timber, border-wall civic spaces, Indigenous textile traditions, a student craft program in Kentucky. The museum announced the winners on Feb. 25 and honored them at the Smithsonian National Design Awards Gala in New York on May 19. As the fall season begins, the list is worth revisiting.

How the awards work

The awards were launched in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council and recognize individuals and organizations across 10 categories. A multidisciplinary jury of practitioners, educators and leaders chooses the winners. The 2026 jury was chaired by Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and included Liz Danzico of Microsoft AI, Patricia Moore, Henk Ovink, Valerie Steele of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Thomas Woltz.

Chen said the awards "shine a spotlight on the designers and communities whose talent and creativity speak of the pluralistic richness of America at its best." Museum director Maria Nicanor called design "a civic force."

The winners

Design Visionary: Robert Earl Paige, an artist, designer and educator whose Dakkabar Collection, home furnishings inspired by West African textiles, was sold in more than 100 Sears stores nationwide in the 1970s.

Climate Action: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, for the UCSD Community Stations, a network of civic spaces along the US-Mexico border on both sides of the border wall.

Emerging Designer: Mattaforma, a New York City architecture and research studio founded by Lindsey Wikstrom, focused on mass timber and healthy materials.

Architecture: Frida Escobedo Studio, with offices in Mexico City and New York, whose recent commissions include lead designer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Modern and Contemporary Art Wing.

Communication Design: Thought Matter, the New York studio founded in 2015 by Tom Jaffe and led by Jessie McGuire, whose clients have included the Met and the New York Historical.

Digital Design: Laura Kurgan, who works in spatial computation and data visualization and founded the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia.

Fashion Design: Josh Tafoya, a Taos, New Mexico textile artist working from Genizaro, Spanish and Chicano heritage.

Interior Design: Charlap Hyman & Herrero, with studios in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City.

Landscape Architecture: Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, of Austin, Texas.

Product Design: Berea College Student Craft in Kentucky, a program that began in 1893 as part of the college's tuition-free work program.

The New York thread

Four of the ten winners have a New York base. Mattaforma and Thought Matter are New York City firms, Frida Escobedo Studio has a New York office, and Charlap Hyman & Herrero lists New York among its three studios. That is the museum's description, not a ranking of cities, and the award is national in scope. Still, readers who care about the city's design scene may note how many winners work here.

Craft, materials and community

A pattern runs through the citations. Mattaforma starts every project with field research into nearby forests, quarries and farms, and designs buildings for disassembly and reuse. Its projects include timber pavilions built in 48 hours and open-air classrooms, per the Cooper Hewitt. Berea's students design, prototype, test and market thousands of objects a year, and the program is open to all 35 academic majors. Tafoya returned to Taos in 2020 to launch his own label, after working for luxury brands in New York City.

The citations for Kurgan and Thought Matter are about civic information. Kurgan's projects visualize systemic injustices, such as incarceration patterns in Million Dollar Blocks and migration flows in Exit, according to the museum. Thought Matter has partnered with the Times Square Alliance and the Street Vendor Project on civic advocacy.

Beyond the awards

The Cooper Hewitt said it would mark the year with Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian's Design Collection, a multi-year installation planned to occupy the entire first floor of the Carnegie Mansion, drawing on a collection of more than 215,000 objects. The announcement said it would open "this summer." We did not confirm the opening date or what is currently on view, so check the museum's site before you visit. The museum is at 2 East 91st Street.

What we could not confirm

We have not verified individual claims in the winners' citations, such as the Sears sales figures, beyond the museum's own text. We also did not find independent coverage of the May gala or of the jury's deliberations. A Smithsonian release about the gala was not accessible to us.

FAQ

Who won the 2026 National Design Awards?

Ten winners across 10 categories, led by Robert Earl Paige as Design Visionary.

When were the winners announced?

Feb. 25, 2026, with the gala on May 19 in New York City.

Who chaired the jury?

Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

Sources

*Cover photo: Hay Kranen, Wikimedia Commons, *[*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aric_Chen_(Q131555886).jpg*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aric_Chen_(Q131555886).jpg)* (CC BY 4.0).*