The Latest in Design with 2025 National Design Awards Winner Nu Goteh

Why It Matters

Goteh’s award highlights a growing demand for designers who blend strategic branding with social purpose, reshaping how organizations create value through community‑centered, process‑driven design.

Key Takeaways

• Emerging designer Nu Goteh blends branding with social impact.
• Design is positioned as both form‑making and meaning‑making practice.
• Community engagement requires designers to act as guests, not experts.
• Projects span rebranding NGOs, Google workplace experience, and memorials.
• Nu emphasizes process over product, selling the design journey.

Summary

The Cooper Hewitt ceremony introduced Nu Goteh, founder of Room for Magic and co‑founder of Deem Journal, as the 2025 National Design Awards winner in the Emerging Designer category. The award celebrates early‑career talent that reshapes design’s role in society, and Goteh’s work exemplifies a practice that fuses branding, strategy, and community activism.

Goteh argues that design operates on two poles: the aesthetic, form‑making side and the deeper, meaning‑making side that shapes cultural narratives. He frames design as a simple pursuit—creating conditions for people to thrive—while acknowledging its existential consequences. This duality informs his projects, from rebranding the World Peace Foundation to collaborating with Google’s Experience Institute on belonging in the workplace, and leading community‑driven memorials for the Underground Railroad.

Key moments include his personal turning point after the Trayvon Martin murder, which redirected his career from marketing to problem‑solving design, and his mantra that “design is a practice that reflects society, but also instigates society.” He emphasizes that designers must approach communities as guests, leveling power dynamics to earn trust and co‑create narratives.

The conversation signals a broader industry shift toward socially responsible, process‑focused design. Brands and institutions that adopt Goteh’s model—prioritizing purpose, iterative practice, and expansive possibilities—stand to deepen impact, foster authentic engagement, and future‑proof their relevance in an era of rapid cultural change.

Original Description

What do you mean by design? Opening up the question at the heart of his practice and business, Room for Magic and Deem Journal, Nu Goteh—winner of the 2025 National Design Award for Emerging Designer— will present his renowned work that spans his community-centered research, branding, publishing, and social practice. He will explore the ways he and others have used design as cultural authorship, meaning-making, and a tool for intervening in the systems that organize our lives. After his presentation, Goteh will have an intimate conversation with Salome Asega, Director of NEW INC, a museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology. Together, reflecting on the past year, they’ll discuss design’s ability to mirror and shape the world we live in and the role it plays in a time defined by change.

SPEAKERS

Nu Goteh is a designer, strategist, and educator who envisions design as a tool for communities to reclaim their futures. As founder and principal of Room for Magic and co-founder, managing partner, and creative director of Deem Journal, Goteh is at the forefront of an emerging generation of designers who integrate design, culture, art, community, and social practice. Through Deem’s global platform, which has expanded beyond the print journal to include experiential activations and digital content, Goteh works to create a more inclusive future by examining design as a process instead of as output. His community-centric studio practice, Room for Magic, brings together marketing, storytelling, creative direction, and human-centered design for clients such as the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, the World Peace Foundation, the National Memorial for the Underground Railroad, and the Urban Civil Rights Museum, as well as for brands like Jordan and Headspace. Influenced by his Liberian heritage and passion for counterculture, Goteh is a global voice for design as a social practice.

Salome Asega is the New Museum’s Deputy Director of Strategy and Innovation, overseeing NEW INC, the museum’s cultural incubator for creative practitioners working across art, design, and technology. Asega is also an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technologies. Prior to joining NEW INC in 2021, Asega was the inaugural New Media Art Research Fellow for Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, where she supported artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. She is also a cofounder of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory based in Brooklyn that offers free and sliding-scale workshops run by established media artists. Since 2015, Asega has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.