In October, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will give the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement to Eva Zeisel, recognizing her "lyrical and shapely ceramics" and extraordinary productivity (more than 100,000 objects). As is often the case with such awards, the recipient is elderly; she will be 99 in November. Her greatest commercial success occurred a half-century ago, when her Tomorrow's Classic line was the best-selling set of dishes in the country and her Prestige glassware was sold all over the world.

But Zeisel is not ready for the design-history books. After a hiatus between 1963 and 1983, she has spent the past two decades creating new work not only in ceramics but in furniture, tile, glass, and metal. Newlyweds again furnish their table with her platters and vases from Nambé, and the prophetically named Tomorrow's Classic has been reissued with minor modifications and now sells as Classic Century at Crate & Barrel. Zeisel is not just a prolific creator. She's an intellectual force within design, and she has lived to see her sense of the designer's mission return to the profession's mainstream.