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Part of the portfolio for this year’s Lifetime Achievement award winner: Ross’s Landing Park and Plaza entrance bridge, Chattanooga, TN, 1992. Architecture: SITE (James Wines, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Joshua Weinstein). Engineers: Hensley-Schmidt. Construction: Soloff Construction Company. Photo: SITE

Recognizing everything from landscape architecture to fashion, the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt Design Awards recognize the best in design. Some names, like this year’s winner for Corporate and Institutional Achievement, TED, are familiar, while others may be new to most.

Within academic circles, for example, Michael Sorkin is a well-known architecture and planning critic and professional whose texts show up on college syllabuses across the country. His 2011 All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities takes on his own New York City, including the controversial Ground Zero Memorial and proves why his is a bold and valued voice in the field. For this and other works, Sorkin is being honored with the Design Mind award.

For the other honorees, we’ll let their posters, gardens, restaurants and clothing speak for themselves:

Landscape Architecture, Margie Ruddick

When asked to create a “winter garden” for the Bank of America Tower in New York City, Ruddick created this living sculpture. She says, “we created an immersive green environment that is designed to make you feel like you have stepped into the natural world of the city.”

Urban Garden for Durst Organization, Bank of America building, New York, NY, 2010. Landscape design: Margie Ruddick with WRT. Artist: Dorothy Ruddick. Design architecture: Cook + Fox Architects; Architect of record: Adamson. Fabricator: Mosaiculture Internationale de Montréal. Photo: Sam Oberlander

Communication Design, Paula Scher

Known for her rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic–she’s designed posters for Elvis Costello–Paula Scher is a clear voice in communication design. Her advice to aspiring designers? “Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that’s how you grow.”

1995-1996 Season Poster for the Public Theater, New York, NY, 1995. Photo: Paula Scher/Pentagram

Interior Design, Aidlin Darling Design

Aidlin Darling’s design for this ultra-hip San Francisco bar and hangout got almost as much attention as the food. Generous with the wood, the design also employed billowing glass curtains.

Ductal concrete banquettes, Bar Agricole, San Francisco, CA, 2010. Photo: Matthew Millman

Architectural Design, Studio Gang Architects

Designed for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, this structure takes its inspiration from a tortoise shell. The archway was part of a larger boardwalk that transformed an urban pond into “an ecological habitat buzzing with life.”

Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, IL, 2010. Photo: Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing

Fashion Design, Behnaz Sarafpour

Sarafpour began her career in New York in 1989 when she attended the Parsons School of Design. Since then, her work has found its way into special lines for Target and several museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London.

Dress in recycled antique embroidered linen with cherry pit buttons, spring 2011. Photo: Dan Lecca

Interaction Design, Local Projects

To gather the stories of a mining community for an area museum, Local Projects built a recording studio from ”a trailer clad entirely in copper…in homage to the single metal that the Southwest is famous for supplying.”

Miners’ Story Projects, nationwide, 2006. Photo: Local Projects

Product Design, NewDealDesign

Based in San Francisco, NewDealDesign combines graphic, interaction and industrial design to create products that also serve as solutions.

Lytro Light Field Camera, 2011. Photo: Mark Serr

Lifetime Achievement, James Wines

Wines has long integrated green design principles into his work, such as this Las Vegas Denny’s that also includes a wedding chapel.

Denny’s Flagship Diner, Neonopolis, Las Vegas, NV, 2012. Architecture: SITE (James Wines, Matthew Gindlesberger, Sara Stracey, Denise MC Lee). Fabrication: A. Zahner. Photo: SITE

TED founder Richard Saul Wurman is busy working on his next project, WWW, set to launch in September. He stopped by Cooper-Hewitt’s Design Fair in the Kogod Courtyard to talk with teens about his career. Photo by Ryan Reed.

“The game that can give you 10 extra years of life”

“Four principles for the open world”

“10 things you didn’t know about orgasm”

Buzzy titles like these now populate the TED talks website and attract thousands of viewers the same day they appear. Few people haven’t been told they “have to watch this one lecture on TED” by friends amped on a new idea. But the very first TED conference back in 1984 was a relative flop, according to its creator Richard Saul Wurman.

Wurman designed the now iconic TED logo–standing for technology, entertainment and design–in 1983. Image by Richard Saul Wurman.

Though Wurman led TED into more prosperous times, still enjoyed today, he tired of the format and sold the enterprise to Chris Anderson in 2001. He is now preparing to unveil his newest project, WWW, calling it the conference of the 21st century. Wurman, this year’s winner of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Lifetime Achievement Award, is known both for founding the blockbuster conference series and for his propensity to grow restless and move on to the next thing.

Starting in architecture, he hopped from book writing to conference organizing. With each venture, whether he was writing a guide to investing or a foreign city, Wurman used new ways to visualize and communicate information. Sometimes called an “intellectual hedonist,” his work follows his curiosity as it zigs and zags across media.

“I am an unusual choice to win the lifetime achievement award,” insists Wurman. His path to success doesn’t trace the typical vertical route up the hierarchy. Instead, he says he’s worked horizontally on disparate ideas united by his impulse to design and explain.

Along with this year’s nine other Design Award winners, Wurman had a packed Friday dining at the White House with Michelle Obama, but began his day at the Cooper-Hewitt’s third annual Teen Design Fair. Students from New York City and Washington, D.C. were invited to talk with dozens of experts working in architecture, fashion, urban and landscape design, industrial design and communications.

Students circled around Wurman, whose craft was listed as “Architecture/Interiors.”

“I don’t own a suit,” he tells the students. “I don’t own a tie. I never dress up.” Wurman delights in the iconoclast role and drew the students in with his frank way of talking. It’s no coincidence his TED conferences were modeled on the same kind of frank, anti-establishment thought.

Wurman describes TED as the conference of the 20th century. He says WWW will be the conference of the 21st century. Photo by Ryan Reed.

Wurman began with one of his five methods of innovation: subtraction. “I subtracted panels of white men in suits, CEOs and politicians, lecterns, long speeches,” recalls Wurman.

By now his signature 18-minute time frame is familiar and the diversity of speakers he attracted introduced new voices to the spotlight. These bite-sized, personal lectures, though held in a very exclusive setting, make online viewers feel they are part of the idea and not just hearing about it. But even that format has grown cumbersome in Wurman’s mind.

On the move yet again, Wurman is working on a new project called WWW, which he describes as the conference of the 21st century. TED now falls squarely in the 20th century, according to him. Subtracting both set presentations and time constraints, WWW will create “intellectual jazz” between two “of the most extraordinary people” Wurman knows. For good measure, musical directors Herbie Hancock and Yo-Yo Ma will add improvised contributions. The whole project is driven by the experimental whims of its creator; “When I’m tired of listening to them, I pull them off stage.”

The first talk is set for September 18-20, but he says he has no clue who the participants will be yet. Once he settles on guests, Wurman will help build an app for each conference allowing viewers to learn as much as they possibly can about each speaker. If the speaker is Frank Gehry, “They’ll see Frank Gehry talking about 30 buildings he never got to build,” explains Wurman, promising interviews, baby photos and even a look at the personal notes and work of each subject.

Branded as the future of conferences, WWW actually draws inspiration from 19th century salons with Wurman playing the role of Gertrude Stein. As TED moves further into the realm of lectures and ideas that “make a difference,” Wurman seems more concerned with the very nature of an idea as a social product.

And, of course, he’s concerned with staying curious. As soon as something fails to hold his interest, he’s on to the next project.

It’s Wurman’s salon, after all, and we’re just stopping by.