Across NYCxDESIGN 2026, the annual celebration of global design that took place in venues around the city this spring, members of the Pratt community displayed creative work, participated in dialogues, and made connections with peers and industry professionals.
Graduate and undergraduate students from the School of Design won a 2026 NYCxDESIGN Student Product Design Award for the El Puente Mobile Teaching Kitchen, which was a product of Assistant Professor of Interior Design Irina Schneid’s annual Co-Design Studio.
Beginning in 2025, students traveled to Brooklyn’s El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice to co-design a mobile teaching kitchen. Following multiple co-creation sessions with high schoolers to determine what a mobile kitchen should entail, they envisioned transformable kitchen assemblies and eventually combined ideas into a multifunctional cooking and learning space. Built by the students in the School of Design’s Production Labs, the El Puente Mobile Teaching Kitchen has since been installed in the school.
The kitchen supports curricular and cocurricular cooking activities within El Puente and features integrated storage, a built-in toaster oven, an electric cooktop, and a transformable workspace. The project will also be featured in the forthcoming publication The Essential Guide to Co-Design by Schneid, which is slated for release in late summer. The book is an interdisciplinary guide to community engagement in design and features eight case study projects that exemplify this work.
“This award is recognition of collaborative work, community-based work, youth-engaged, and youth-championed work,” Schneid said. “To see NYCxDESIGN and Interior Design Magazine recognize community engagement as a generator of exciting design opportunities and outputs is really wonderful. It shows that the future of design is embedded in community and generated through collaboration with community.”
Pratt faculty and alumni found clever ways to manipulate and contain light for the SHINE exhibition. Curated by Industrial Design alum Harry Allen, MID ’94, the exhibition featured “original light objects by 70 designers exploring craft, technology, personal expression, and function,” including Fuse Lamp by Allen; Spire Fold by Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design Alvaro Uribe; Artifact by Professor of Industrial Design Constantin Boym; Ascend by Visiting Assistant Professors of Undergraduate Architecture Ann Dinh and Emre Ozdemir; Onshil by Dokyung Ahn, BID ’25; Site Lite by Visiting Instructor of Industrial Design Danielle Begnaud and Assistant Chair of Industrial Design Matte Berit Nyberg; Horeb’s Ember by Joshua Cruz, MID ’27; Snow Mobile by Mary Wallis; and Good Night Light by Che-Wei Wang, BArch ’03.
At the Javits Center in New York City, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) hosted the Wanted Launch Pad, an international platform for emerging designers featuring work by Dash Schaeffer, BID ’27; Thalia Lee, MID ’26; and Peter Lim, BID ’24. The Wanted Look Book, a platform for high-end North American designers, featured lighting and rugs from Ridima Jain, MID ’23.
“It was an honor to have been a part of ICFF 2026, and what a thrill it was to meet so many cool and inspiring people,” Schaeffer said. “Exhibiting my work was a huge door opener to new opportunities and showed me that there is a lot of interest and a market for my work here in NYC but also North America. I can’t wait to see what projects and collaborations come to fruition from this, as I’m already exchanging with many architects and interior designers.”
“During my time spent in Rwanda, Sozi was the result of a collaborative effort between myself, the MASS x Made team, and their network of local artisans,” Lee said, referencing a course taught by Foundations Associate Professor Juan Jofre Lora in 2024. “The experience of showing and meeting visitors at ICFF helped me view it through the eyes of other people, see which parts of it they resonated with, what contexts they could visualize it in, and perhaps how it could be adapted. My favourite part of the experience was seeing people naturally want to take a seat in the chairs, settle in comfortably, and have a conversation, which helped reinforce that it creates the welcoming space it was meant to.”
Pratt participated once again in the WANTED Design Schools Workshop, which brings together students and faculty from design schools across the United States, Latin America, and Europe.
This year, six Pratt students joined the three-day workshop led by faculty from Mexico City’s CENTRO under the theme “The Unseen Narratives: Everyday Stories that Can Transform How We Live.” As part of the program, Industrial Design faculty member José de la O was invited by the CENTRO team to present recent work developed by his students, highlighting speculative design strategies explored through projects by three graduate students in particular.
Pratt’s 200-square-foot booth at the WANTED Student Showcase included 14 different projects exploring “sustainability, community, and the evolving standards of the discipline [of design], expanding its scope and fostering connections with real-world contexts.” The overall Wanted series is a space for international design schools to recruit students and to connect with other international schools to create partnerships and potential exchange programs.
Students also gathered to share work and network for the annual “NYCxDESIGN Student Showcase” hosted by Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), featuring students from FIT, The Cooper Union, New York Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts.
These events dovetailed with Pratt Shows: Design, where local high school students and industry professionals were invited for a curated tour of an ambitious range of graduating student work, spanning graphic design and illustration, fashion, industrial design, interior design, architecture, and fine arts jewelry.
