How design museums can effect change in cities

Maria Nicanor, Director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City, believes design museums can play critical roles in inspiring transformative change in cities through creative storytelling and engagements. 

What role can design museums play in contributing to a more design-conscious culture?

Maria: All of us are experts in design as we experience and use buildings, systems and products in every aspect of our daily lives. Even if you don't know it, you are experiencing hundreds of design systems from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. When something is well designed, you feel comfortable. It is intuitive. You hardly notice it. That's because someone has thought about it and designed something for you.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is constantly inspiring new perspectives on the role of design. An example is the “Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics” 2023 exhibition on how creative design responses to the COVID-19 pandemic can help people access medical and other forms of care easily. Image: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

I see museums as the great mediator in breaking down that invisible wall of design to spark interest and open new possibilities for how design can improve and transform our lives and cities.

How are museums evolving to cater to different ways people consume information?

Maria: Museums tend to be places that are more top-down, where experts share a certain narrative. You have a passive learning experience and then you leave. Libraries offer an interesting model as they are a lot more open and less imposing. People can find many ways of accessing information at libraries based on their interests and preferences.

There are many ways of learning at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on the power of design. Workshops and toolkits like this “Design A Streetscape” for children help build design skills and capabilities for all ages. Image: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

I see museums evolving to become more multi-dimensional to cater to different ways people consume information. Some may prefer to go to a lecture while others may prefer something more experiential. It is about finding new modes and ways of storytelling, not just through exhibitions.

How is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum experimenting with its programming to engage with your audiences?

Maria: When you think about a design museum, it is often housed in a contemporary building. What is special about the Smithsonian Design Museum is that it is in the historic home of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, built from 1899 to 1902.

Image: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

This creates interesting options for us to experiment, juxtaposing contemporary uses within historic spaces to offer something that people may not expect. Instead of exhibitions, we could use the space for other activities such as dance performances.

Beyond exhibitions, we are partnering with stakeholders such as design schools in New York City to create more varied programming. We are mixing up the disciplines to create richer content and experiences, where architects could work with musicians, for example.

Breaking out of the physical and mental walls of these institutions, we are also extending the museum experience to the streets. We are exploring how to be more porous and playful in our programming for greater interactivity.

Having lived in many countries, which city has interesting and memorable public spaces that appeal to you?

Maria: I'm from Spain. Maybe I am biased, but I love the public spaces in Barcelona. It was the urban planner and engineer Ildefons Cerdà (1815-1876) who created the grid-like streets. He saw the streets not only as spaces that could support many uses but also as a source of wellbeing. Gardens were planned in the centre of each street block.

Residents walking in a traffic calming area in Sant Antoni, Barcelona. It is part of the city’s superblocks approach to transform city spaces by prioritising people over cars, creating greener, more liveable neighbourhoods. Image: Oscar Giralt. 

Over time, we've built upon this with a good mix of planned and organic public spaces. Public spaces have become an integral part of the city grid, intertwined with the social fabric and city life.

The very idea of having public spaces where people can inhabit and make them their own is something very special. It's almost like an extension of your own home. Sometimes, you want to be in a space that is close to the action. Or you may need a quieter spot to sit, read and drink your tea.

This is something that I sometimes take for granted, as not all cities cater to public spaces in the same way.

What does a well-designed public space look like to you?

Maria: A well-designed public space is one that caters to people's needs, whether it is a space with facilities for activities or spaces for relaxation. A good public space should encourage and facilitate interactions amongst communities. It is comfortable for people to gather, which might mean having sufficient shade. It could have space for children to play.

Public spaces become even more meaningful when they serve as a connection to key places in the neighbourhood and bring people together. Such spaces should feel like an integral part of the streets and the immediate neighbourhood. Communities feel like they own these spaces and want to care for them over time.

You've always believed that people have the power to change the environments around them. How do you see your role in influencing such change?

Maria: As a curator, I believe I can help people become more aware of the environments and systems that influence and shape their lives through storytelling. Design is not just about individual buildings, objects or things. It is also about the way things are organised and how they bring together interconnected elements.

Conceptual design for ilumiNACIÓN, a web-based platform designed to drive equitable and sustainable climate solutions while strengthening communities’ capacity to respond, rebuild, and prosper after extreme climate events. It is developed by the nonprofit organisation Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR), one of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2025 National Design Award winners. Image: RPPR.

From how streets are designed for a comfortable walking experience to how public transport networks are designed for people to get to places quickly and easily, I see my role as peeling away and revealing the design rules and systems that shape our environments, raising awareness of what design can do. With greater knowledge and insight about design thinking and systems, people can then decide how they want to get involved and determine the kinds of changes they would like to make to their environments and cities.

Looking ahead, what are some important challenges architects and designers should pay closer attention to?

Maria: I think increasing loneliness and ageing populations in cities are major challenges that architects and designers could help to develop design solutions for. I believe design can help to alleviate the sense of loneliness in cities, whether it is creating more inviting public spaces for people to gather or designing platforms to connect people in different ways.

A transformed green space under the Los Angeles Metro by landscape architecture design studio, TERREMOTO, one of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 2025 National Design Award winners. Image: Stephen Schauer.

I am also keen to see how landscape architecture can be used to mitigate the effects of climate change. It is not just a field to beautify spaces or plant more trees. For such complex challenges, there must be greater collaboration across disciplines and fields amongst landscape architects, engineers, policymakers and others.

Museums can play key roles in raising awareness and encouraging greater discourse on these important issues.

About Maria Nicanor

Maria Nicanor is the 2025 President*s Design Award Design Panel Jury Member. 

She is Director, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City. It is America’s only museum dedicated to historic and contemporary design, with a collection of more than 215,000 design objects spanning 30 centuries. An architecture and design curator and historian, Maria is passionate about public access to culture and rethinking the traditional roles of museums by experimenting with new storytelling formats that connect cultural institutions with civic life. She was previously the Executive Director of Rice Design Alliance, the public programmes and outreach arm of the Rice School of Architecture at Rice University in Houston. Maria was also the inaugural Director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, and a curator at the Design, Architecture, and Digital Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before that, she spent most of her career as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she held several positions between 2005 and 2013, including Associate Curator of architecture and urbanism and Co-curator of the BMW Guggenheim Lab project.