The awards span 10 categories, from architecture and landscape design to fashion and product design, with accolades for trail-blazing corporations and thinkers who’ve dedicated their careers to making design accessible to all.

Richard Saul Wurman, a protegé of architecture and design icons Louis Kahn and Charles Eames, scooped up the Lifetime Achievement award. Most notably, he is the creator of TED, the highly acclaimed series of global conferences. Under Wurman’s tenure, a number of now universally used innovations premiered. Most notably, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer at the very first TED conference in 1984, and the conference has been a platform for such other game-changing launches as Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop programs, GM’s OnStar navigation system and even Google.

Janine Benyus, pioneer of the biomimicry movement, received the Design Mind award. Benyus’s Biomimicry Guild has worked with hundreds of renowned clients, including Boeing, Herman Miller, General Electric and Interface. Last year, she formed Biomimicry 3.8., an initiative that educates and certifies biomimicry professionals.

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects takes home the Architecture award. Based in Atlanta, the firm’s portfolio includes a Jenga stack-like science and technology facility at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the palatial architecture school at Ohio State University and the massive health centre at Yale University.

Evan Roth has nabbed the Interaction Design award. Roth is creative force behind the Eye Writer, an eye-tracking system that was initially designed for Tempt1, a paralyzed graffiti artist. The device was recently featured in the MoMA’s Talk to Me exhibit. He’s also working with Jay-Z on a crowd-sourced hip hop video.

Clive Wilkinson Architects, a Los Angeles practice best known for its large-scale contract projects, won the Interior Design award. The firm has worked with giant corporations across the world including Google, Vitra and Nokia.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism, a young from from Boston, nabbed the Landscape Architecture award. Projects currently underway include reimagining the Fox Riverfront in Green Bay, Wisconsin and River City in Toronto, a project encompassing an entirely new neighbourhood on a brownfield site.

Scott Wilson, founder of Chicago’s Minimal design studio, won the Product Design award. Wilson, former creative head at Nike and IDEO, is responsible for the Kinect for Xbox 360 and furnishing designs for Steelcase subsidiary Coalesse. Wilson is a crowd-funding prodigy – in 2010 he raised $1 million in one month for the TikTok and LunaTik cases that transform the iPod Nano into a wristwatch.

For the full list of winners, visit cooperhewitt.org.