Skip to content

design.nyc

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: July 23, 2026

1. Introduction

design.nyc (the "Site") is a public directory of New York City's design community, founded and supported by SENTIENT Furniture Inc. ("SENTIENT," "we," "us," or "our") — a Brooklyn-based design studio and gallery rooted in craft and contemporary design, and the parent company behind sentientfurniture.com. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use and share it, and the choices and rights available to you — whether you are a registered user of the Site or simply the subject of a profile we have compiled from public sources. By using the Site, you agree to the practices described here. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site.

2. Two Kinds of Information on This Site

Because design.nyc is both a compiled professional directory and a service people sign into, it holds two different kinds of personal information, handled differently:

  • Compiled profile information — professional facts about designers, architects, makers, and firms, gathered from public sources and published as part of the directory (see Section 3).
  • Account and submission information — information you give us directly when you sign in, apply for a profile, claim one, or edit one (see Section 4).

If a profile on the Site is about you or your company but you have never interacted with design.nyc directly, this Policy — particularly Sections 3, 8, and 9 — describes how that came about and what your rights are.

3. Compiled Profile Information

For the roughly 2,900 individual and 730 company profiles that make up the directory, we gather professional information from publicly available sources: practice and firm websites, press coverage, professional directories and association rosters, award programs, and public LinkedIn company pages. This can include a name, professional title or firm type, biography, specialties, project history, awards and press mentions, education, firm affiliations and employment history, a publicly listed business email or phone number, social-media handles, website, and a business or neighborhood-level location. Some individual profiles begin from SENTIENT's own professional contact network; where that is the source, we publish only publicly relevant professional facts (name, role, company, general location) and never publish the private email, phone number, or street address held in that internal contact record. Consistent with this data-minimization approach, we do not compile an individual's home address, private phone number, or private email anywhere on the Site — any contact detail shown on a profile is one the subject (or a public source describing them) has already made public, or one a verified owner has chosen to publish after claiming their profile. We also draw work images from a subject's own public portfolio or website; Section 8 explains that separately.

We rely on this being a legitimate editorial activity — comparable to a review site, professional almanac, or press directory describing a public professional's work from public information — rather than on the individual's prior consent. Where a visitor is in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with a similar framework, this processing is grounded in our legitimate interest in maintaining an accurate public reference of the New York design industry, weighed against the individual's own interests; Section 9 explains how to object to it or request removal.

4. Information You Provide Directly

We collect information you choose to give us when you:

  • Apply for a profile or search for a reserved one to claim — your account email or phone, and the profile details you enter (display name, bio, professional title, specialties, business contact details, links, neighborhood or location, and, for firms, founding year and team size).
  • Sign in — your email address or phone number, used to send a one-time sign-in link or verification code.
  • Edit a claimed profile — any of the public fields above, plus portrait/logo and work images (up to 15 per profile), project history, recognitions, education, and firm-affiliation history.
  • Contact us directly — whatever you include in your message.

Your account email and phone are private: we use them only to sign you in, confirm ownership requests, and send account notices, and we never copy them onto your public profile unless you separately choose to publish a business email or phone on that profile yourself.

5. Information Collected Automatically

Like most websites, our hosting and security infrastructure automatically logs standard technical information — IP address, browser and device type, pages requested, and timestamps — for security, abuse prevention, and basic site operation. design.nyc does not run advertising trackers, third-party analytics pixels, or cross-site tracking scripts, and we do not sell or share this data for advertising purposes.

6. How We Use Information

We use the information described above to:

  • Build, publish, and maintain profiles in the directory.
  • Operate account sign-in, ownership claims, and profile applications, including reviewing claims and applications before they take effect.
  • Send transactional communications — sign-in links or codes, ownership-request confirmations, application-status notices, and similar account messages.
  • Compile and update the events calendar from organizers' public listings.
  • Investigate and respond to correction, takedown, or removal requests.
  • Maintain the security, integrity, and lawful operation of the Site.
  • Comply with legal obligations.

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell personal information.

7. How Your Public Profile Appears

Once published, a profile's public fields — name, title, bio, specialties, project history, recognitions, education, firm affiliations, links, and any business contact details or images on it — are visible to anyone who visits the Site and may be indexed by search engines. If you own or claim a profile, you control its location-visibility setting (exact location, neighborhood only, or hidden) and can edit or remove most fields yourself at any time; see Section 6 of our Terms of Use for how location display works. Submit only information you are comfortable making public.

8. Images and Media

Work images on a compiled, unclaimed profile are typically drawn from the subject's own publicly available website or portfolio, displayed for the editorial purpose of representing that person's or firm's work, with the profile page itself serving as attribution. Once you claim a profile, you can add, reorder, describe, or delete its images, and any image you upload is handled as described in Section 7 of our Terms of Use — you must hold the rights to it, and you grant us a licence to display it while your profile is published. If you are a rights holder who wants an image removed, replaced, or credited differently — whether the profile is claimed or not — contact us using the details in Section 14 and we will act on it promptly.

9. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of personal information we hold about you, to object to or restrict certain processing (including the compiled-profile processing described in Section 3), and to withdraw any consent you have given. This includes rights available to New York and California residents and rights available under the GDPR to visitors in the European Economic Area and United Kingdom. The most direct way to exercise these rights over a design.nyc profile is to claim it, which gives you ongoing control to edit, hide fields, or request removal yourself; you can also contact us directly at any time — whether or not you claim the profile — to request a correction, an export of what we hold, or complete removal, and we will act within 30 days. We may need to verify that you are the profile's genuine subject before making certain changes, to prevent impersonation.

10. Cookies

The Site sets one cookie that matters for privacy: dd_session, an essential, httpOnly session cookie created when you sign in, used solely to keep you authenticated across pages for up to 30 days. It is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking, and we do not run third-party ad or analytics cookies on the Site. Disabling cookies in your browser will prevent you from signing in but will not affect ordinary browsing of public profiles, listings, or the events calendar.

11. Third-Party Service Providers

We use a small number of infrastructure providers to operate the Site, each of which processes data on our behalf under its own security and privacy commitments:

  • Vercel — application hosting, image delivery, and file (blob) storage for profile and event images.
  • Supabase — our hosted database, storing profile, account, and events data.
  • Resend — delivery of transactional emails (sign-in links, ownership and application notices).
  • Twilio — delivery of one-time text-message verification codes when you choose phone sign-in.
  • Cloudflare — bot- and abuse-prevention checks on public forms (applications, claims, sign-in).
  • Google Maps — embedded maps of studios, offices, and event locations; see Section 10 of our Terms of Use regarding Google's own terms.

We do not use advertising networks, and none of these providers may use your information for their own advertising purposes.

12. Events Calendar Data

Information in the events calendar — event names, descriptions, dates, venues, and organizer names — describes third-party events and organizers, not individual visitors. We do not collect RSVPs, ticket purchases, or attendee information through the Site; any registration happens on the organizer's own site, referenced in Section 9 of our Terms of Use, under that organizer's privacy practices.

13. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell personal information. We may share it with the service providers listed in Section 11 so they can perform the functions described; when required by law, subpoena, or court order; to protect the rights, property, or safety of SENTIENT, our users, or the public; or in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, with notice where required.

14. Data Retention

We retain compiled profile information for as long as it remains a useful, accurate part of the directory, and account information for as long as your account is active. If you request removal of a profile or deletion of your account, we will remove the associated personal information within 30 days, except where we need to retain limited records to comply with law, resolve disputes, or prevent abuse — for example, a record that a removed profile should not be re-imported.

15. Data Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures — including passwordless authentication, encrypted sessions, and access controls limiting profile edits to verified owners and administrators — to protect the information we hold. No method of transmission or storage over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

16. Children's Privacy

design.nyc is intended for adults working in or engaging with New York's professional design community and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect account information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has created an account, or that a profile improperly concerns a minor, contact us and we will address it.

17. International Visitors

The Site is hosted and operated in the United States. If you access the Site from outside the United States, your information will be processed in the United States and other countries where our service providers operate, which may have different data-protection laws than your own jurisdiction.

18. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the revised Policy on this page with a new effective date. Continued use of the Site after a revision takes effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated Policy.

19. Contact

For questions about this Privacy Policy, to exercise a data right, to correct or remove a profile, or to report an image that should be taken down, contact:

SENTIENT Furniture Inc. 276 Greenpoint Avenue, Building 9, Floor 5 Brooklyn, NY 11222 Email: contact@sentientfurniture.com Phone: (888) 236-8862 www.sentientfurniture.com