Best Design, Cooper Hewitt announced 2013 winners

Be part of this year's Lifetime Achievement Award recipients: Ross Landing Park and Plaza Entrance Bridge, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1992. Architecture: Place (James Wine, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Joshua Weinstein). Engineer: Hensley Schmidt. Construction: Soloff Construction Company. Photo: Website

Recognizing everything from gardens to fashion, the 2013 Cooper Hewitt Design Awards recognize the best in design. Some names, like this year's Corporate and Institutional Achievement Award winner TED, are familiar to everyone, while others may be new to most people. For example, Michael Sorkin is a well-known architecture and planning critic and professional whose articles appear on college syllabi across the country. His 2011 Panorama: Writing on Buildings and Cities showcased his own version of New York City, including the controversial World Trade Center Memorial, and demonstrated why he is a bold and valuable voice in the field. For this and other works, Sorkin was awarded the Design Thinking Award.

For the other winners, we will let their posters, gardens, restaurants and costumes speak for themselves:

Landscape Architecture, Maggie Ruddick

Ruddick created this living sculpture when asked to create a "Winter Garden" for the Bank of America Tower in New York City. "We created an immersive green environment designed to make you feel like you've stepped into the city's natural world," she said.

Durst Organization Urban Garden, Bank of America Tower, New York, New York, 2010. Landscape design: Majludik & WRT. Artist: Dorothy Ruddick. Design architect: Cook Fox Architects; architect of record: Adamson. Manufacturer: International Montreux Mosaic Culture. Photo: Sam Oberlander

Communication Design, Paula Scher

Known for her rock aesthetic—she 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, you can push, you can invent, you can be ignorant, you can be arrogant, you can fail, you can be a fool. Because in the end, that's how you grow.

1995-1996 New York City Theater Season Poster, 1995 Photo: Paula Scher/Pentagram

Interior design, Aidlin Darling

Aidlin Darling for this home. Ultra-stylish San Francisco bar and hotel design gets almost as much attention as the food, with generous touches of wood and billowing glass curtains

Piped Concrete Banquet, Bar Agricole, San Francisco, California. , 2010. Photo: Matthew Millman

Architecture, Studio Gang Architects

Designed for Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, this structure was inspired by a turtle Shell. The arch is part of a larger boardwalk that transforms an urban pond into a "life-filled ecological habitat."

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

Fashion Design, Bernards Saraf Poole

Saraf Poole began her career in New York City in 1989 while attending Parsons School of Design. Since then, her work has been featured in Target and multiple museums. Special Collection, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Dress in recycled antique embroidered linen with cherry pit buttons, Spring 2011.

Photo: Dan Leka

Interactive Design, Local Projects

Gathering the story of a mining community for a regional museum, the Local Project used "an all-copper trailer... to pay homage to South West, known for supplying "single metal", built a recording studio, Nationwide, in 2006. Image: Local Project

Product Design, San Francisco-based NewDealDesign

NewDealDesign combines graphics, interaction and industry