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John Underkoffler, co-founder and CEO of Oblong Industries, has been announced the winner for Interaction Design by the highly acclaimed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

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Underkoffler, along with winners from ten other design categories, will be awarded at the gala event in New York October 15, during the United States' National Design Week for 2015 (October 10-18).

The National Design Awards are the highest accolade for an American designer to receive, initiated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to recognise design excellence.

'The National Design Awards are a tremendous honour! We look forward to working with the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum on a series of programs and events leading up to Design Week in October,' said John Underkoffler.

Underkoffler, computer scientist, user-interface designer and founder of Oblong Industries, has had his work acknowledged for its 'excellence, innovation and enhancement of the quality of life'. His work reflects the notion that advancement of the human-machine interface (HMI) is essential for our future of living in a digital world.

Underkoffler is best known for his visionary development with computer technology. However his claim to fame in the non-design world was for pioneering the way in gestural technology, first seen in Tom Cruise's Minority Report and the films Hulk, Aeon Flux, and Iron Man that followed.

Read the article about Territory Studios, the futurology masterminds behind Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ex Machina, Prometheus and more.

After bringing to life a no-limit approach to futurology in Hollywood over ten years ago, Underkoffler continues to lead the real-life development of the g-speak software platform, enabling the construction of distributed, collaborative, gesturo-spatial systems at Oblong.

Following Underkoffler's remarkable TED talk in 2010, 2012 saw the release of Mezzanine, a commercial version of futuristic technology that was bought by at least a dozen agencies yet. Is this the way forward? Already enhancing conference calls and aiding the military with situational awareness, Mezzanine could soon be featured in every workplace. Underkoffler is currently working on Mezzanine 3, the next generation of their visual collaboration environment for innovative workplaces;

'Mezzanine provides a shared digital workspace with work surfaces spanning multiple walls - multiple rooms and locations, even - in which multiple participants can come together to share and work on content, data, and any variety of applications and video feeds side-by-side. In a very direct way, Mezzanine proposes that adopting and amplifying the sorts of hyper-visual workflows that characterize the design world is a valuable shift for collaborative work in any domain.'

Other winners from the awards include the late renowned architect and industrial designer, Michael Graves, who will be honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award, Coen + Partners for Landscape Architecture and Commune for Interior Design.

The complete list of winners and their categories:

Interaction Design - John Underkoffler

Lifetime Achievement - Michael Graves

Director's Award - Jack Lenor Larsen

Design Mind - Rosanne Haggerty

Corporate & Institutional Achievement - Heath Ceramics

Architecture Design - MOS Architects

Communication Design - Project Projects

Fashion Design - threeASFOUR

Landscape Architecture - Landscape Architecture

Interior Design - Commune

Product Design - Stephen Burks

Read the full run-down of winners at Cooper Hewitt