Well, I’ll never forget dealing with VitrA – the bathroom company in Istanbul, not the other Vitra, (by the way it took about 45 minutes after they called to work that out) – and [spending] an hour talking [to them] about sculpture….We spoke about Henry Moore, paganism – all that – and it was that connection that made me take on their project. Anyway, at the end of the day, they said they wanted a ‘Ross Lovegrove’ bathroom. I said, “Please tell me, what’s a Ross Lovegrove bathroom?!” And they said “It’s white and organic” – which, as it turned out, was actually right for the product. Still, slowly over the years I’ve been trying to twist that white, curly and futuristic label to get a bit more free from what people expect you to deliver as a designer. Organic design is just one of the definitions describing what I’m trying to do with creativity and expression.

I’d say technology [such as] 3-D printing has had an effect that’s both good and bad. I’ve always tried to adapt – Darwin never spoke about the ‘survival of the fittest’ but the ‘survival by adaptation’ and I remembered that, so any time some new tech comes along that will change the polarity of how we create, I jump on it. I did the world’s first magnesium-injected chair years ago and I made a model of [it] in my workshop, spraying foam, covered in dust, breathing it all in... And that was the last time I ever did anything in a workshop. After that, I hired the right people, bought these new computers, bought the software and, rain or shine, decided that approach was what I was going to do.

We work with a network of the most advanced people across Europe and beyond, and my team are high-level generative designers, mainly architects who understand modern processes. The creatives I work with are among the best in the field of parametric modelling and 3D printing. We are like a digital SAS unit. At our level, the process of computational work is very intense, but the positive side that you get to create things that are very enriched, formally really beautiful and ever so complex in a sculptural sense. You see this kind of extreme digital design mainly in
architecture, like with Zaha Hadid studio, or 2D AI-generated imagery, very rarely in physical industrial design like I do.

I believe I am a sculptor; designer is just a title. I’m more interested in the emotional presence of the object. Mine is a form of generative design, meaning they grow. If you think of old mechanical objects, they were bulky and oily and squeaky. But we’re in a new age now – with digital design, you press a button and this object grows out of nowhere. It is incredibly emotional. So, why would anyone do things the way they were done a hundred years ago? Some of my designs may seem insignificant, but at least they test an ideology.

I’ve been designing since I was 16, and there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t considered how things are made. Design has therefore become instinctive. You can get through this business being distant, copy and be lazy. But I won’t make anything that could be made even five years ago. I want people to be able to carbon date my designs, to remain relevant, not only in terms of process and materials but also the changes in our environment, social and cultural. What we do here is an aesthetic revolution - sculptural and technological.

I’m an evolutionist, more than a designer. I don’t know what design is anymore, I create form, I understand form and I’m enjoying the digital age to create it. I’m hoping to push that even further. My work also relates to nature, in an evolutionary sense as I’m concerned with reduction. I exercise what is called ‘organic essentialism’ which means using nothing more – nothing less than is needed. I feel comfortable in this organic, isomorphic, anthropomorphic, liquid age of making things, but I try not to force it into things that don’t need it.

Personal projects because I do them for myself. I loved working on my design-art seminal works. A series of pieces that I have made in carbon fibre and aluminium. Those really synthesise the concept of ‘organic essentialism’. Art kind of works and exhibitions are always a moment of hesitation for me, I’m looking internally at what I do so that I can grow again. Then there are also the products that I’m known for, like the water bottle for instance, that have sold very well, but these projects for me are really more about the meaning of ‘why we produce them’. I’m always trying to do things with minimum resources but at the same time achieve the maximum iconic effects. Ultimately I’m looking for a ‘system’ that can let me approach the work that I do with some degree of logic and intelligence.

One grows up, and has a series of influences and those influences bear down on how you design objects eventually in your life. Some of my early work was definitely experimental. I was exploring and trying to see where I would fit in. A defining moment was a camera that I did at the Royal College Of Art during my studies. At the time the Memphis movement was all the rage, but I doubted that whole language to be honest, the colours and basic geometries didn’t feel very natural to me. So I designed this camera, that to me defined some sort of restraint, which I still have in me. Very much like my DNA staircase, a self made object, which has everything that I’m looking for – in terms of elegance of form, minimum material, appropriate technology and succinct function. If I were to do a camera now though, I have this feeling that I should do it in a cartilage type of material, somewhere between nylon and silicon, or biological skin. I’m often looking at principles called netification, choralization and reduction of mass through perforation and so on, not necessarily in terms of products but cars and architectural projects too.

I thought that by now I would have completed a project for an electric autonomous car and a new small-scale architecture that would both relate to contemporary issues and material/technological capabilities. I was getting really close up until about two and a half years ago and then covid and the Europe-Russia political crisis hit and kind of took away these possibilities. I had spent a lot of time and energy trying to set these up, so I became rather demoralised and it took the wind out of my sails for a little bit. Now I'm trying to reinstate those ambitious projects again but in the mean time I keep myself busy working on speculative and personal art pieces with as much invention and optimism as I can.

In five years I would hope to have had some exhibitions of my work that give me the opportunity to organise my mind and understand better what my contribution was, is or could be in the creative world. I will probably look for projects that complete my body of work as a designer, or revisit some projects that I always thought could be better. As a sculptor/artist I will continue to express my inner most feelings which indirectly reinforce my design and explore concepts that move people emotionally from the deep past to the deep future. I will continue to seek out my dream of transportation and architecture even at a modest scale but if this does not happen by commission I will probably try to build those myself. I will always continue to draw and try to stay relevant.

The emergence of AI softwares to imagine and visualise is an inevitability given the human desire to bring the hyper-realism of advanced CGI and animation - that we have seen in movies for the last couple of decades - into the fields of three dimensional creation. Parametricism, scripting and the use of subdivision and morphogenesis has led to exciting new structural aesthetics that are helping us transition towards a more biological expression and 3D physiognomy in our physical environment. The potential link to additive manufacturing is profound at all scales and physical states... what is unfolding is an unstoppable new force of nature that acts in symbiosis to challenge all previous methodology and results in terms of the otherworldliness that is emerging in human visual expression.

Well first their titles do describe this as a journey of discovery and surrealist dreams  suggesting that AI is releasing a form of sub-consciousness that consciousness in the human  imagination is too self-conscious of exploring. For years I have been experimenting with the concept of complexity, form, structure and  material appropriation moving from the Analogue process of the 20^th Century into the  Digital realm of the 21^st Century using every new tool that’s come available at its inception. What creatives can see in my work now with this new software is a dialogue between my  life’s work and an artificial intelligence that is fully informed by imagery and discourse, so  that outputs are initiated by acceptance and freedom of co-expression, then revised over  and over until the design becomes closer to my vision.  The results often challenge my philosophical position about purpose, scale, extreme  expression, fabrication and even what my design represents but I accept that these concerns  will meld into the process once the ability to talk and express feelings together will resonate  in a highly sophisticated mutually future orientated ambition. One way to start this process is to see this software as partner in redefining one’s creative  language and thus guiding and influencing a new evolutionary curve. In both of my TED talks I have eluded to this synergy founded upon our increasing  understanding of the building blocks of life…at TED Global in Oxford in my talk entitled  ‘GENESIS’ I was articulating the need to use algorithms to replace human design process in  order to form a closer bond to the logic and beauty of our biosphere and Nature’s  embedded intelligence. I believe that with the correct inputs, agency and awareness of all  things considered, AI will be capable of defining the absolute logical basis of why, how and  what we create…so that DESIGN becomes a new force and regenerative tool for life  addressing all the issues that confront us.

Once we understand how to create the manufacturing data set from this AI softwares  visualisation and produce almost at a cellular biological level, then the forms and structures  we see will drive a radical and disruptive-paradigm-shift in the physicality and perceived  value of everything including Art. When I see works by artists like Refik Anadol’s ‘Quantum Memories’, the emotional charge is  like nothing else we’ve ever experienced. It is truly mind-blowing as well as mind-expanding  as an alternate dimension of the natural World and a radical visualisation of our digitised  memories of Nature. The future will hopefully pull together the best of VR, AR, QP, AI, EI, The Metaverse , NFTs  and more, to makes us realise that what we create and make in the real dimension of our  existence needs to be ultimately more inspiring, experiential, meaningful and emotional.