Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A virtual lunchtime talk with Jules Sherman, winner of the 2025 National Design Award in Product Design, as she reflects on how her design practice has evolved over the past decade. Drawing from her work in medical device design and healthcare innovation, Sherman will share the fundamentals of her process—tracing her early use of hand-drawn sketches to her current use of AI tools. She will also discuss what it means to design for patients and families, and how designers can better understand and serve the people at the heart of their work. After her presentation, Sherman will have an intimate conversation with Amber Bravo, who leads Story Studio at Figma, a cloud-based digital design and collaboration tool that Sherman uses in her human-computer interaction studies. Together, they’ll discuss AI’s role in supporting a designer’s need for speed and integration while breaking down barriers to using various software and coding tools. Learn more about the National Design Awards: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/national-design-awards/ Jules Sherman is a leader in pediatric medical device design and healthcare innovation. Inspired by a traumatic hospital birth experience in 2010, she turned her focus from consumer product design to transforming pediatric and maternal healthcare through FDA-cleared devices that prioritize safety and efficacy. For the past 12 years, Sherman has worked within innovation labs at Stanford Medicine and Children’s National Hospital. In these environments she 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. As an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, Sherman has the opportunity to share her methodology and work experiences with bioengineering students. Sherman is currently a graduate student at UC Irvine studying human-computer interaction where she is developing projects for pediatric and mobile clinic applications. Amber Bravo works at the intersection of product, brand, and strategy. She leads Story Studio at Figma, where she helps shape how the company shows up and how its products are understood—from vision and direction to the launches and tools where design happens every day. Before Figma, she led the creative and storytelling strategy for Material Design at Google. Her background spans design and cultural storytelling, with earlier work at Herman Miller, Dwell, and The FADER.

In conjunction with the current exhibition Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, please join Christopher Payne and Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic and author Alexandra Lange for a discussion on Payne’s intricately detailed photography of America’s factories. The program will consider Payne’s photographs of industrial manufacturing as part of a long history of image-making of American architecture and design, highlighting spaces of production, the skilled workers who make things, and the products themselves. They will also discuss the significance of Payne’s work now, in this period of rapid industrial transformation. Speakers Alexandra Lange is a journalist, design critic, and author. Her essays, reviews and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications as well as in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. She is a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. In 2025 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for a series there on how urban design and architecture affect children and families. Her latest book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2022. She is currently at work on a book about the 1970s and DIY culture. Christopher Payne studied architecture at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an architect for twelve years before committing full-time to photography. He is fascinated by design, assembly, and the built form. Over the past decade, through personal projects and editorial commissions, he has been on a photographic journey to learn more about what’s made here: the traditional industries that “built this country” as well as the newest and most technologically advanced processes. These images can be found in his latest book, Made In America. Payne’s work frequently appears in The New York Times Magazine and Popular Science, and in other major publications including Interview, National Geographic, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Time, and Wired, among many others. MADE IN AMERICA: THE INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF CHRISTOPHER PAYNE ON VIEW through sept. 27, 2026

What do you mean by design? Opening up the question at the heart of his practice and business, Room for Magic and Deem Journal, Nu Goteh—winner of the 2025 National Design Award for Emerging Designer— will present his renowned work that spans his community-centered research, branding, publishing, and social practice. He will explore the ways he and others have used design as cultural authorship, meaning-making, and a tool for intervening in the systems that organize our lives. After his presentation, Goteh will have an intimate conversation with Salome Asega, Director of NEW INC, a museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology. Together, reflecting on the past year, they’ll discuss design’s ability to mirror and shape the world we live in and the role it plays in a time defined by change. SPEAKERS Nu 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. Salome Asega is the New Museum’s Deputy Director of Strategy and Innovation, overseeing NEW INC, the museum’s cultural incubator for creative practitioners working across art, design, and technology. Asega is also an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technologies. Prior to joining NEW INC in 2021, Asega was the inaugural New Media Art Research Fellow for Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, where she supported artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. She is also a cofounder of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory based in Brooklyn that offers free and sliding-scale workshops run by established media artists. Since 2015, Asega has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.

Join Michael Maltzan, 2025 National Design Award winner in Architecture, and Florian Idenburg, co-founder of Brooklyn-based architecture firm SO-IL, for a discussion on urban housing in Los Angeles and New York. Despite the cities’ distinct housing landscapes, both Maltzan and Idenburg employ imaginative, experimental, and persistent strategies to expand architectural possibilities through projects ranging from private residences to supportive, social, and affordable housing. This conversation will explore their bi-coastal work during a critical moment for urban housing in the United States. Program introduction by Jack Murphy. SPEAKERS Michael Maltzan is principal architect of Los Angeles-based firm Michael Maltzan Architecture, which he founded in 1995 and 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. 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. A fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Maltzan’s honors include Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award in Architecture (2025) and 2016 AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal. Florian Idenburg is a co-founding partner of New York-based architecture firm SO–IL with Jing Liu. Founded in 2008, SO–IL has grown into a world-renowned architecture firm with public and private clients spread around the globe, from France and South Korea to the United States and Mexico. Their work is celebrated for its sensitivity, intellectual rigor, and imaginative approach to solving challenges of the built environment. Idenburg has a particularly strong background in institutional spaces, leading the office on projects such as Kukje Gallery and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis as well as Amant in Brooklyn. His strength lies in generating imaginative ideas and transforming them into real-world spaces and objects. A frequent speaker at institutions around the world, he has taught at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, and Princeton University, and is currently a Professor of Practice at Cornell University. In 2010, Idenburg received the Charlotte Köhler Prize from the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund. He is a registered architect in the Netherlands and an International Associate of the American Institute of Architects. Jack Murphy is editor in chief of The Architect’s Newspaper (AN) and AN Interior. He previously held the roles of executive editor and managing editor for these publications. Before joining AN, he was editor of Cite and an adjunct professor at the University of Houston. Murphy was co-editor-in-chief of PLAT 8.0 Simplicity and the assistant editor for Totalization, edited by Troy Schaum and published by Park Books in 2019. He received an Honorable Mention for the Pierre Vago Journalism Award 2020 from the International Committee of Architecture Critics and was named the 2017 Associate Member of the Year from the Texas Society of Architects. His writings have appeared in many publications, and he has contributed to a handful of books. He earned degrees in architecture from MIT and Rice University. Prior to being an editor, Murphy worked for award-winning architecture practices in Boston, Austin, Houston, and New York.

In Part 1, dive into the world of contemporary speaker design with fast-paced presentations by New York’s rising audio innovators—Deborah Garcia, Mo Yasin, and Zoë Mowat and Dave Shaw of Waves and Frequencies. Learn about their strategies for spatial activation, home audio enhancement, and live event sound system set ups. SPEAKERS PART 1 Deborah Garcia is a spatial activator specializing in sonic and structural disruption. She currently teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and is Residency Director and Curator of the Institute for Public Architecture in New York. Zoë Mowat and David Shaw are the founders of Waves and Frequencies (WAF Audio), a hi-fi project based in New York and Ontario, Canada. Their approach to sound was shaped by DIY dance culture over many years of friendship, seeing high-fidelity sound as conduit for connection through music. Both industrial designers and DJs, they design and manufacture loudspeakers that bridge acoustic engineering, furniture design, and the social experience of listening. Mo Yasin is a Sudanese-American DJ, speaker designer, and event producer from Virginia. Shaped by years behind the counter at record shops and driven by a deep passion for the sound system traditions of New York, the UK, and Jamaica, Yasin embodies a true do-it-yourself ethos. A quiet, decade-long career as a DJ in New York has evolved into an audio practice that merges technical precision with a wide-ranging musical sensibility, utilizing his custom-built sound system as a tool to explore and continually refine the dance floor experience.

For Part 2, enjoy a dynamic conversation where writer and curator Vince Aletti speaks with DJ partners and publishers Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele of Love Injection. Together with moderator Matthew Higgs, they’ll unpack the visual language of album covers, posters and flyers. Discover how music’s graphic design including typography, color, and production techniques help shape memories and history. Expect a lively show-and-tell as Aletti and Love Injection share stories and rare examples from their experiences documenting, collecting, and distributing this cultural ephemera.