THE CITY WE’RE DESIGNING, WHETHER WE ADMIT IT OR NOT
An Open Letter to New York City’s New Administration
At Thought Matter, we often find ourselves asking the same question: How does our work actually show up in public life? Not in theory, but on the street, in a park, in a library, in the spaces people move through every day without thinking twice.
Recently, and proudly, we heard the answer. Last month, we won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, recognizing our work at the intersection of communication design and civic life.
Everyone in our studio lives in one of New York City’s five boroughs. This city isn’t an abstraction to us. It’s where we raise children, care for parents, wait for trains, and look for a place to sit, so a new administration lands personally. That administration shapes our daily lives and the responsibility we feel as designers.
That’s why reading Michael Kimmelman’s recent Critic’s Notebook and the New York Times reader poll that followed gave us pause. When New Yorkers were asked what they wanted their next administration to focus on, the answer wasn’t flashy or ideological. It was parks and libraries.
Parks and libraries are among the last places in New York where you can be welcome without buying anything. Where access isn’t tied to income, membership, or status. Where the city makes a promise and keeps it.
Communication design plays a real role in how that promise is received. It shapes how rules are expressed, how information is shared, and how welcome is signaled. It determines whether a space feels open or policed, generous or hostile, cared for or forgotten. Over time, these cues teach people what kind of city they live in.
We’ve seen this firsthand through our work with libraries, cultural institutions, and public-facing systems. When we designed posters for Banned Books Week this past October, the work was about making freedom visible and reminding people that libraries and books are not neutral or passive, but active defenders of shared knowledge, dissent, and access. The message “Free Speech Ain’t Free” had to be clear at a glance and strong enough to withstand being picked apart, undermined, or misrepresented.
Our practice has always moved between the speculative and the concrete. Not as an academic exercise, but as a practical one. Cities need both. They need space to imagine what doesn’t yet exist and the discipline to bring those ideas into public life. Last year, through a speculative project called “People Over Profit”, our studio explored what it might look like to reimagine city systems that have quietly failed the people who rely on them most. One proposal focused on parks designed specifically for new mothers, spaces that recognize care work and recovery as civic concerns, not private ones. Another looked underground, at defunct transit tunnels, and asked why so much shared space remains sealed off when it could be repurposed for public art and cultural exchange. New York once came close to something like this with “The Underbelly Project”. The question isn’t whether the idea is compelling, but why it stopped short of becoming part of a larger civic vision. That question felt particularly relevant when Mayor Mamdani took his oath of office at midnight in a subway tunnel, an act that acknowledged the symbolic power of the city’s unseen spaces and the possibility of rethinking where the bounds of public life begin.
We asked a more direct question during the previous administration: “Who Is NYC For?” Through an immersive public exhibition during the NYCxDESIGN Festival, we used that question to examine who benefits from the city’s systems and who is left navigating the gaps. The work focused on everyday friction points: access, cost, visibility, and care. It asked visitors to consider how those forces shape who feels welcome, who feels provisional, and who feels pushed to the margins. “Who Is NYC For?” was never meant to have just one answer. It was designed as a lens that could travel and evolve, one through which the city could examine itself.
Our inquiry and innovation don’t happen in a vacuum. Over the past ten years, we’ve worked in every borough, partnering with community-based organizations, BIDs, chambers of commerce, and civic groups, from Times Square and Union Square to Long Island City and Downtown Staten Island. These collaborations are where our questions have a practical effect. They’ve taught us that communication design in public life carries responsibility. People engage with systems they understand and disengage from the ones they don’t.
New York’s most meaningful transformations have never come from policy alone. They’ve come from moments when the City understood its own history well enough to imagine what could be possible again. In the past, administrations aligned with artists, designers, and cultural workers to help the public see themselves as part of a shared project. Notable examples include New Deal-era murals and posters and public programs that made government visible in everyday life.
For far too long, New Yorkers have been told, implicitly and explicitly, what isn’t possible rather than what is. What can’t be built? What can’t be funded? What can’t be changed? Yet the public keeps asking for the same things: parks, libraries, and places that support learning, rest, care, and community. This year, Jessie McGuire, Managing Partner, joined the inaugural Van Alen Institute Vanguard, a new effort designed to further the Van Alen Institute’s century-long commitment to civic design. The institute’s history is a reminder that moments like this aren’t new, and designers have a responsibility to help make shared possibilities visible again.
At Thought Matter, we are ready to meet this moment. We’ve been shaped by reaching out to the community, listening closely, and taking seriously the role design plays in public life. We believe in work worth doing: work that helps people understand their city, recognize themselves within it, and feel invited to participate in shaping what comes next.
This administration has an opportunity to set a new standard for how public priorities are felt, not just announced. Parks and libraries are a powerful place to begin. They are spaces where values become tangible, where care becomes visible, and where the city can remind people that they belong without having to prove it.
After so long a period in which so many New Yorkers have been told what isn’t possible, there is real power in showing what is. We welcome the opportunity to help make that vision visible in the streets, in shared spaces, and in the everyday experiences that define life in this city.