Smart Design (or Smart) is a design consultancy based in New York City. Smart was founded in 1980 by

industrial designers Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advance of the manufact ...

Davin Stowell, Tom Dair, Tucker Viemeister, and Tamara Thomsen, with Stowell serving as CEO. The firm has been a prominent presence in the design industry since the late 1980s, as design competency increasingly came to be seen as "key to industrial competitiveness". The company has had offices in San Francisco, Barcelona, and London at various points in its history in addition to its NYC headquarters, and has worked with clients including HP,

Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is an American multinational corporation founded in 1886 that develops medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods. Its common stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the company i ...

Gillette Gillette is an American brand of safety razors and other personal care products including shaving supplies, owned by the multi-national corporation Procter & Gamble (P&G). Based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, it was owned by The ...

BBVA Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (), better known by its initialism BBVA, is a Spanish multinational financial services company based in Madrid and Bilbao, Spain. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, and is present ...

, PepsiCo's

Gatorade Gatorade is an American brand of sports-themed beverage and food products, built around its signature line of sports drinks. Gatorade is currently manufactured by PepsiCo and is distributed in over 80 countries. The beverage was first develope ...

, and Pyrex. In 2012, the company worked with the City's Taxi and Limousine Commission to redesign NYC's iconic taxis as part of a collaboration with Nissan titled the Taxi of Tomorrow, and also developed the now ubiquitous logo and decals found on the city's yellow taxis and green boro taxis. The firm is best known for its design of the original Oxo Good Grips line in 1989, and longstanding relationship with Oxo, which continues to this day. The Good Grips potato peeler, the first in what would become a large range, was designed with OXO founder Sam Faber's wife Betsy in mind, who suffered from Arthritis. The Good Grips range of products is often cited as an archetypal example of an approach to industrial design involving user-centered prototyping and iteration, and where considerations of human factors and accessibility make a product better for all users. The Good Grips line is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and New York's

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, ...

. In 2010, the company won the

National Design Award The American National Design Awards, founded in 2000, are funded and awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New ...

for product design from the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Industrial design firms Design companies of the United States Companies based in New York City