On Thursday we hosted the IDSA Winter Gala at the LIXIL Water Experience Center. The New York chapter of IDSA organized a truly wonderful award ceremony, celebrating Leah-Marie Boake (NJIT - Student Award), Stuart Harvey Lee and the Prime Studio team (Inspiration Award), Nancy Perkins, who started the IDSA Women’s Section with Sharyn Thompson in 1992 (Luminary Award), and, last but not least, our friend Tucker Viemeister, who received the prestigious Bronze Apple Award for his lifetime dedication to great design and a strong, vibrant design community. Congratulations to all this year’s winners!
Beyond the celebrations, this event meant a lot for our team, and it meant a lot for me. I arrived in NYC in the 90s and was welcomed into the industrial design community through regular IDSA events. I got to meet countless wonderful, talented people, got jobs, and learned a lot very quickly. NYC is the birthplace of Industrial Design in America (the first design office was started by Henry Dreyfuss in 1929), and it flourished here before spreading from coast to coast. IDSA was always the go-to place to connect and keep abreast of where our industry was going. At Dreyfuss’s I worked under Jim Ryan, a staunch advocate for the organization, when he was President of IDSA in the mid-90s.
So it was only natural that, shortly after moving our design team to New York City in 2016, we started hosting the IDSA Holiday Gala in our Grohe Live Center on 21st Street, as well as our Perspective series of panel discussions aimed at bringing the history of industrial design to life for new generations of designers. Tucker was our accomplice for the first one, and for the last one I moderated a panel with Michael Cousin, Lucia DeRespinis, and Alberto Montoya, who shared amazing stories about our community (my favorite was Lucia telling us about creating the original Dunkin’ Donuts logo as the lone female designer in Louis Nelson’s office).
Sadly, COVID saw us close our office and move to temporary spaces across the city, until our new LIXIL Water Experience Center was completed 10 months ago. Hosting the 2025 IDSA Holiday Gala meant we have finally come full circle and can again play a role in supporting a community that is more vibrant, diverse, and influential than ever.
A big, big thank you to the IDSA NY Chapter, and to our fantastic showroom team: Amie Milano, Chris Agostinelli, Josh Bryan, and Julia Arieno.