Oblong CEO Wins National Design Award

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We at Oblong Industries are beyond pleased, honored, and thrilled to announce that our CEO John Underkoffler has won the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in the category of Interaction Design. In working with him on a daily basis we always knew he was exceptional, but there’s nothing like a little external validation to really make your day. As this is indeed the nation’s highest honor recognizing design excellence, we couldn’t be more proud. 

The National Design Awards were conceived by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to acknowledge lasting achievement in American design, and are "bestowed in recognition of excellence, innovation, and enhancement of the quality of life". First launched at the White House in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the annual Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of the impact of design through education initiatives.

We join this program with absolute enthusiasm -- design currents run deep at Oblong Industries. Our work builds on John's conviction that the most powerful digital systems in the 21st century will emerge from a vigorous design-centered evolution of the human-machine interface (HMI), a theme he's been pursuing for twenty-five years. Of course, actually getting there requires hard and sustained effort, a real commitment to human-first design, and an ardor for working at the boundaries of the built environment, both physical and digital. Customers engaging with our Client Solutions team on custom g-speak projects, along with those whose collaborative work practices are supercharged by our flagship product Mezzanine, experience first hand John’s leadership in next-gen HMI thinking. 

It's our mission to "provision the world with new computing forms of genuine value and durable worth, forms profoundly capable, human, beautiful and exhilarating". We're delighted that our co-founder and CEO has been recognized for his body of work in interaction design and computer science.