National Design Awards
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum today announced the 23rd class of National Design Award winners, honored for design innovation and impact in nine categories. Established in 2000 as a project of the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards bring national recognition to the ways in which design enriches everyday life. Winners are selected by a multidisciplinary jury of practitioners, educators and leaders from a wide range of design fields. This year’s National Design Award recipients included ITP's Alum, Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy for Product Design - CW&T
Cooper Hewitt stated, "The National Design Award for Product Design, given to an individual or firm for the design of goods, furniture, lighting and materials, is awarded to CW&T. CW&T started as and remains the two-person design practice of Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy. Over the past 13 years, their work has spanned from interactive software to human-scaled tools that enhance people’s relationships to work, life and time. The practice centers around an iterative process of sketching, prototyping, testing, writing code, machining parts and building each edition themselves to assess their intuitions around improving everyday experiences. Projects range from devices that alter the perception of time, an electronics curriculum for artists and an astrological compass for space travelers, to objects engineered to last multiple generations.
With backgrounds in architecture, film and computer science, the duo met at NYU ITP where they began their scale- and medium-agnostic approach to design. Wang and Levy lecture extensively, and they teach courses on time, electronics, hardware, programming, inflatables and morphology at Pratt Institute, New York University and the School for Poetic Computation. Their pedagogy extends into their Brooklyn home/studio where they host office hours to lend a hand or offer insight to anyone interested in figuring out how to make something themselves.