Cooper Hewitt

10 stories

Cooper Hewitt“Frederic Church in Jamaica” to Open This Fall at Cooper Hewitt as Part of Global Celebrations of Church’s 200th Birth Anniversary —Cooper Hewitt, which holds the largest collection of Church works in the world, will showcase rarely seen sketches from the acclaimed painter’s travels— This fall, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design…

10.05

Cooper Hewitt

Cooper HewittThe Inside Track: Christopher Payne on Photographing the MTA Join MTA Arts & Design and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for a special conversation celebrating the opening of MTA Arts and Design’s In Service: MTA Photographs by Christopher Payne and…

09.30

Cooper Hewitt

Cooper HewittImage Making and Innovation at MillerKnoll In conjunction with Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk on the critical role photography has played at MillerKnoll across the…

09.30

Cooper Hewitt

Cooper HewittMaria Nicanor talks with Robert Earl Paige, 2026 National Design Awards Winner, Design Visionary Join Cooper Hewitt for a talk with Design Visionary Award winner Robert Earl Paige—the first program in a new series spotlighting the 2026 National Design Award winners in conversation with Director…

07.28

Cooper Hewitt“Design Across Time” Now on view Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is unveiling its permanent collection galleries with Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection .

06.26

Cooper Hewitt

Cooper HewittDesigning Healthcare in the AI Era, National Design Award Winner Jules Sherman & Figma’s Amber Bravo 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.

06.25

Cooper HewittCooper Hewitt Unveils Permanent Collection Galleries Showcasing a Multi-Year Presentation of the National Design Collection This summer, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will unveil its permanent collection galleries with a landmark presentation, “Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection.”…

06.15

Cooper HewittCooper Hewitt Celebrates 2026 National Design Award Winners and Honorees at Annual Gala Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum honored the winners of the 2026 National Design Awards alongside a distinguished group of Gala Honorees at the annual Smithsonian National Design Awards Gala…

05.20

Cooper HewittMichelle Millar Fisher is Appointed Chief Curator of Cooper Hewitt Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum today announced the appointment of Michelle Millar Fisher, Ph.D. as Chief Curator, effective July 13.

05.12

Cooper HewittMidwest Winner Kalina Prospect High School Cook County, IL Student Design Strong connections to oneself and community are essential for well-being, yet increasing dependence on technology has led to widespread…

04.03

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo