Here is the full transcript of my conversation with legendary designer Ross Lovegrove for Whitewall magazine fall 2009. Ross is a VERY interesting guy — on many levels. Every Creative should read this.... there are a lot a ideas here...
Whitewall’s Creative Minds is a continuing conversation with visionaries in the fields of art and design that focuses on the unique drive behind today’s top thinkers. This new feature offers a condensed version in print, followed by an extended online experience that allows you to download and listen to the full interview. In the first dialogue, Whitewall speaks with the legendary designer Ross Lovegrove about the role of nature and technology in his creative process, as well as a mysterious white marble cube. Find below the full transcript and a condensed version in the fall issue of Whitewall, out at the end of the month.
WHITEWALL: Last time we talked you were in Miami, presenting the chandelier you designed for Svarowski. What has happened since then?
ROSS LOVEGROVE: [Laughs] Oh my God, you mean generally? I don’t know what the joke is. It’s like “a year in the day of.” People like me are incredibly active. I don’t know if it’s a disease, an addiction, or something healthier than that. [Laughs]
WW: Actually I was leading you on with this: I know you were a few days ago in New York and now you’re back in England. You travel constantly. Is it part of the job?
RL: Yeah, I think it’s a good point to discuss. Most weeks I do a minimum of two countries. This week I’m in Milan and then I’m in Paris. Last week it was Copenhagen, Vienna, and Venice. And the week before I was in New York. The reason for that is very simple, really, I don’t work where I live. I’m in a profession which has become very very global. The industry is constantly relocating; it means that certain countries have different approaches to production or making things. Italy, is an obvious example, where there is an enthusiasm for making objects. Whereas if you broaden your horizons you have to go to places like the United States, you have to talk to very big corporations about new possibilities.
WW: People who look outside-in may not understand this. They might imagine, “being Ross Lovegrove, he should get an agent and have the agent do the travel for him everywhere.” Whereas in reality you have to be there to speak with actual people.
RL: I’m more of an artist in that sense because I represent what I represent — the way I speak, my body language, my motivation, my philosophy. There is nobody else I’ve ever met who can totally represent that. You know, ‘what you show is where you go’. It’s much better to be clear. The clarity is everything. In the work that I do, in the way that I meet people, there is a certain synergy and good energy that comes from just the chemistry of people. But I’m not really interested in just being anything that come my way. It’s quite the opposite, really. I control very much who I am, and I don’t deviate from my belief system. I have a lot of asking me if they want to be my agent. One of the rules in life in never to be owned. That’s when people have a financial interest in you, or they have other interests and they’re pushing their own interests.
At the end of the day, I’m creating a body of work which is a sort of “life work,” if you like, which tries to stay relevant to the possibilities of the times in which we live. Design has become a very sophisticated art form, I think.
WW: You once said: “I don’t know what’s design anymore.”
RL: No, I don’t [laughs].
WW: [Laughs] I also heard you say: “Design is the new art form for the 21st century,” so…?
RL: You know, I’m just trying to be provocative; but I mean something I question. And I think that’s why I try to do interesting things because I haven’t found a formula that I’m spreading like butter on everything. I’m really not interested in that. I’m interested in a sort of organic morphology of ideas and the fact that you create an entity which can absorb other possibilities. That’s why as a designer I believe that if you’re going to take the resources out of the earth and create something with it; you should create something as extraordinary as possible. Design is often regarded as disposable or easily replaced with another idea, whereas art has a certain enduring feeling to it.
WW: In your day to day, how do you break through the status quo? As an innovator, when you meet with corporations that are not necessarily opened to new ideas. Do you have a technique of ‘shock and awe’? How do you do it?
RL: [Laughs] No, the thing is I’ve never had a fear of the future or being visionary in some sense. What we understand is based on some previous history — what we read, what we’ve seen in films, conversations. It’s what we know and what we know is always a retrospective thing. There are certain kind of people who can visualize or ‘plot the future’ in some way. But they’re basing the future on all the same information everybody else has. These people must be really unusual. How can you see the future if you haven’t been there? This is all predictive theory. I’ve always said “what man thinks often becomes reality, it’s just a question of time,” you know. Because there’s an unspoken objective in society. For somebody like me, I like to work at my full potential.
What interest me right now is the concept of evolutionary theory. Evolution comes into three phases. In the primary evolution nature moves forward at a glacial speed it’s almost imperceptible. Nature creates through adaptation and it is a very slow burn. But the period we’re in right now is tertiary evolution, it’s a third level evolution. And what excites me about that is the fact that a couple of engineers can sit down in Tokyo and decide that they can make a television which is 3 millimeters thick; and in one year have it standing there. I find that incredible. Human beings have accelerated that process for good or bad.
For me the new millennium didn’t start in the year 2000, it will stat next year [2010], a decade later. That’s interesting because it’s given us this decade to settle in, to understand where the world is going. Even the recent crisis is helping fund that; it’s helping industry and society generally to look at the geopolitical nature of what we do to be a little more human-centric. So it’s really not a bad time, one way or another. You know, the evolution of sustainable projects, new energy resources, the way cars will look, the way that cities will look, how we deal with collective issues, that is fascinating, and that give people like me a chance to maybe participate at a more effective level.
WW: There is a funny idea that came about while preparing this interview, when you talk about life, nature, etc. When you say “nature is about adaptation, morphology and response to environment and change,” I thought to myself, “is he talking about nature or about Ross Lovegrove?”
RL: The thing is, one works through observation. You have your silent thoughts, staring at nature. Funny, I woke up this morning at 5 A.M., reading a book on the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, the photographer. I was interested in his childhood; how somebody like that could suddenly engage in the concept of light either through his photography of theaters or his photography of the sea. Where do people come from? And what read was incredibly honest and very transparent which is very rare for artists, they don’t really speak in a very transparent way. And one cannot deny one’s past.
WW: My understanding is that you grew up in a military family. Legend has it that your dad would bring back interesting objects. You grew up in a small village, not an urban environment. Did it force your mind to wonder, to look at things?
RL: The key was that I felt very different; never fitting completely in my family or community. Hard to explain that because I never had any experiences to compare, never travelled, never really went anywhere. So, you develop the power of observation. I was quite silent as a child, I use to go on long walks by the sea and it was just me and nature — and, you know, it’s enough.
If you want to escape, if you want to have some peace and serenity you go to nature. And even the sea — it comes out, it comes in — there’s a rhythm like the rhythm of the blood flowing through your veins. It’s an absolute joy.
Recently I went out to the desert in Libya. It was incredible because in the afternoon when the sun was overhead, the whole scene was very bleached out. And as the sun goes lower it creates shadows which gives you what look like waves in the sand and you feel like you’re in an ocean, even though you’re in a desert.
WW: The patterns are matching — patterns of the ocean, patterns everywhere. That’s one of the themes in your work, the idea of finding patterns and playing with them.
RL: Yeah, only two hours ago I had a break from a meeting and I went to buy a book on clouds. They’re all the same. I’m an earth sign, I’m very grounded in a respect and interest for nature — nothing moves me more. Typically, when I’m in a city environment, which I am a lot, I start to feel like there is something missing. So I become a conduit for a lot of people’s feelings who would prefer to be in nature but are embedded in the technocracy of cities. So what I’m looking to do in my work is to put very subliminal, earth, human-centric resonances back into the objects.
WW: You call yourself an evolutionary biologist, but are you a kind of modern Daoist?
RL: Again I was reading in this book on Sugimoto about the concept in Japanese making artifacts, the idea of reaching the absolute goal — the Zen buddhist concept of ‘Mu’ — nothingness. The idea that their ultimate goal is the silence of the object. I feel as if most objects around us aren’t embedded with a deeper concept of spirituality. I really do think that objects can communicate a very polysensorial deep resonance of power of an object. I certainly put that into my art pieces, the pieces I look at that are absolutely private and true to what I do.
WW: You talk about spiritual objects, and it’s interesting because we are leaving the Information Age to enter the Mythical Age. How do you connect with that?
RL: It’s really important — mythology. But I don’t calculate from the mind, I shoot from my heart. I try to retain instinct on behalf of people. Things I do are more than what they are, they have an aura of something more. The fact that we can talk with someone across the planet as we are now. The fact that we have something unconnected to create connectivity is shockingly interesting for me.
I have to go back to the desert a little bit. I went walking, and you have a very hard surface on the desert, like a crispy top, a sort of crème brûlée, and it just slightly breaks with your foot. And you can’t stop walking — it’s an amazing feeling. It’s so purposeful, you’re out in the horizon — it’s an incredibly sensual experience. And as the sun goes down, it is replaced by the moon and I was there when it was a full moon. And you suddenly realize how beautiful our planet is. The moon is like a mirror reflecting the light from the other side of the earth; I find that incredible. We take these things for granted, but we live in a moment of almost perfect harmony between nature, mother earth and the potential for human beings. I think it’s really an interesting moment and it is spiritual — it’s got to be spiritual.
If you take all of those factors: the need to understand population and migration of people, issues of resources wether that be food or manufacturing of objects, our energy sources, or how we create money and wealth. I mean everything, as we speak, is up for reconsideration. That has to be a globally conscious spiritual act — it has to be.
WW: You have said that in your studio you “try to keep innovative thinking, this energy of innovation flowing.” How does it work? How many collaborators do you have?
RL: We have 12. It means that anymore than that, I become a manager. I could have more people, but more people would probably mean I would become more of a service processing work, rather than studying it. I like the research process because then you can come up with something new. [In order to do that] you need time and you need funding to go in deep and ask questions. It’s very hard to find really well educated designers these days. I can’t take casual people to help me do what I do. It would be a disaster because my work is an art form. Trying to find the synergy between its need, its typology, its technology, its shape, its overall impact. There are so many factors which go in, which is a bout sitting and staring. It comes back to my youth when I spent hours just staring at the sea. I can look at 8 different violins and tell you which one is a great violin without touching it because I have a kind of instinctive position. People don’t have that today and you can’t be trained in instinct. You either got it or you haven’t. So I have a very tight group of people who understand my idiosyncrasies, who support my dreams; there enthusiastic about the ideas, about pushing things forwards and they don’t see limits. You have to run a studio like this with a very very high energy, almost like you’re still are a student, with that enthusiasm where you can work all night, you can go on a plane, you can go and do it.
WW: In that regard you lead by example?
RL: Yes, I do, absolutely. You know, Leonardo never went anywhere. He went to France, that’s it. Times are different. What I’ve always advocated is to never deviate from the absolute free expression where you fuse design, art, technology and nature. You fuse it all together, and you show that the best you can and hopefully you attract the right people.
WW: Maybe that’s your secret – we talked about this before. Your personal approach is to be an artist; looking for people who support you in your art. It becomes a great filter. You said, “If you have to design a telephone in 3 weeks, it all comes back to instinct,” and you can only have this instinct if it relates to the core of your work.
RL: Exactly, and you might end up coming with something completely new and different. You can work 2 ways: one is on the basis of what you know, which often is limited, of course. Or you work on the basis of what you don’t know. And what you don’t know is very exciting. It’s what you perceive or what you imagine would be an ideal solution. Wether it’s a telephone — on the one side it’s beautifully soft and on the other side it’s cut through like a galet, like a stone. Just the look and feel of objects, without being too romantic about it, but you lead with your ideas and then let technology follow your ideas. Technology is there to back up and reinforce your ideas, not the other way around.
WW: It’s funny you talk about “galets” which are stones on the seashore. I have in front of me [a picture of] the Andromeda lamp that looks like an aquatic creature. There is really this relationship with you and the ocean.
RL: Coming back back to Sugimoto, when I first look at these photographs of the sea where you couldn’t tell the difference between the sky or the ocean what blew my mind was not the image but what he said next to the image. He said that this is probably the last true unchanged image in humanity; meaning maybe 4 millions years ago our ancestors would have had the same view. I find this really beautiful…
WW: What are the things you would like to do let’s say, 10 years from now? What are the big dreams that seem like mountains to climb?
RL: Often the dreams are not about doing bigger things; it’s not about scale. If we were sat together here in my studio and could show you objects around me; I could easily be happy not do anything for 3 months and just, maybe, look at the poems of Carl Andre.
WW: So, again, it’s all about observation first?
RL: You have got to take a deep breath. You can’t run if you don’t breathe. You need to take that space in between. This is the issue of becoming more known, more desirable, more, more, more. It doesn’t leave enough space for reflection. In a kind of very flowing way, I’m quite good at that. This is interesting because a lot of people say to me “Gosh, we’re entering your world now” where the convergence of interest in nature but also understanding of technology and human beings is coming together — all the stuff I’ve been talking about for years.
The thing is, what do you do? At a time where it’s becoming your next decade, do you speed up or do you slow down? Or you just really handpick amazing things which just reinforce the focus of your intent?
WW: I guess this is where you trust your instinct.
RL: I have to, I’ve got nothing else! [Laughs]
WW: Recently, I’ve seen incredible use of bamboo for laptops [prototypes]. In your work so far, you use a lot of very technical material. Is this something yo would like to be involved with, working with natural materials?
RL: I’ve got a cube of bamboo on my shelf, with honeycomb in it. It’s amazing; it’s extruded bamboo. It’s from Japan, they use it as a filter for rice. I did this bamboo bicycle for Biomega which is a very pure expression of bamboo in its very raw form. If I was given the choice I would love to work with hemp or some of these alternative materials; and I would love to look at them in the field of car design or mobility generally. It would be interesting to do some research, you know, one foot in the tree-hugging thing and one foot in luxury — how you define the culture of quality…
WW: In the luxury world there is an important shift right now. It’s not about the bling anymore, it’s about going back to the roots of luxury: quality, craftsmanship, true uniqueness.
RL: The solar car I did for Svarowski was exactly that. It’s being shown in automotive, art, design and technology shows. That’s what interests me – forming a bridge. I’d love to get my hands on a luxury company and be able to bring the heart out and show people that ‘yes, it might be a beautiful suitcase but if it weighs ten kilos; what’s the point?’ You know, 3.2 billion people bought plane tickets last year, lightness is a very dominant factor that we should support. Our ancestors made everything themselves. If they made a bow and arrow, they had to make it as lightweight and as dependable as possible and they only had organic materials: animals and some plants. We live in an age when we have so much access to technology, I’m not sure we’re working at our full potential.
WW: Let’s go into the future: 20 years from now, society has changed in the best possible way. What do you want to see?
RL: I think life would have settled down and we would have understood where our energy comes from and how we use energy and that’s fundamental. How we move around the planet will be looked at again so the way we interact and conduct business will change. There will be unspoken rules about the way that clothes are made, the sheer quantity of the things that are made and lightness will be an amazing factor. I think the concept of “off-grid” where people can be autonomous in the way that they live and make decisions. If I had my way, I would be designing houses which would be self-generating energy and maybe would generate even more that what’s required and would put that back into the grid and share. There would be a sense of community in the way we exchange and share. On a very private level, I have dreams where I would build a white marble cube, and thin the marble in places so that the light would penetrate. There would be no door in it; you’d have to find the door, it would be remote. And I would go there from time to time and in there, would be a minimum of 5 objects which are the greatest things I’ve ever loved. From a Piranesi drawing, to Greg Lynns’ tea and coffee set for Alessi, to one of the greatest prehistoric tools, just objects…maybe incredible sound…
WW: And a book?
RL: Maybe something that would take me a long time to understand — John Donne sonnets from the XVIIth century, which I’d probably have to read a hundred time to understand. Something optimistic in a way, something about love. I would have incredible sound in there, I’m working on a violin right now, so by that time hopefully, it will be finished. There would be objects I could stare at, or feel — objects for each of my senses.
You know, I would have an amazing key made and I would give that to the person I love; and they would continue with it. Maybe they add an object themselves, it’s like an exchange. I think about something that is so peaceful and silent that you can refine yourself.
WW: I love your marble cube idea, that’s really beautiful — I’m there already.
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