2026 Rowena Award Recipient: Hartmut Esslinger

Celebrating design excellence, the 2026 Rowena Award honors iconic designer Hartmut Esslinger for his tangible impact on the way we live. Please join us for a special evening, including the award presentation and a conversation titled “We Can Do Better” with Hartmut Esslinger and Debbie Millman, host of the podcast Design Matters and editorial director of Print Magazine.

Hartmut Esslinger is a German-American inventor, entrepreneur, and industrial designer who advocates good design as beautiful objects, successful experiences, and good business. In 1969, Esslinger founded Frog Design — one of the most famous design consultancies (now part of Capgemini Invent). His influence is felt worldwide through work for Apple, Sony, Disney, Next, and Lufthansa, and through the work of many Frog Alumni. Visionary Steven Holt described him as “brimming with the urgent urge to do things that matter. Hartmut was fearless… forever in search of a better way of doing things.” Esslinger says the design process is like a Greek tragedy: “with a hero, an antagonist, and a hopeless situation.”

Legend has it that when Steve Jobs first visited Esslinger in the Black Forest, he was impressed not only by his passion but also by the way he drove his Mercedes. Together they established the Apple design spirit. “Sometimes,” Walter Isaacson quotes him as saying, “you have to give Steve a stick.” The Apple IIc system, based on Frog’s Snow White design language, was an immediate commercial and critical success named “Design of the Year” by Time Magazine. “A life-changing moment for me too,” Esslinger said years later, “giving me an opportunity to apply everything I’d learned up to that point about industrial design from my work with some of the best executive minds at companies throughout Europe and Japan.”

For decades, Frog took the back cover of ID magazine promoting industrial design. Comparing the stock prices of his clients, he found they outperformed the market – he showed that the design-oriented enterprises generally were more profitable and more culturally valuable. Now he says: “Today’s designers are destined to become the hairdressers of tomorrow’s creative environments – great for styling but light on strategy.”

He says, “Form follows emotion.”