“This is the place where you will experience the least resistance towards your creativity,” said renowned industrial designer Ross Lovegrove as he addressed The Forum at Downtown Design. Lovegrove, who has worked for the likes of SONY, Kartell, Peugeot, Apple, Issey Miyake, and Vitra to name only a few, recently relocated to Dubai where he is in the process of establishing two new studios.
The first will be his eponymous Ross Lovegrove Studio which will preserve and stay true to Lovegrove’s signature style of essentialist form, while the second studio will be more explorative and experimental.
“I don’t want to live in the past, I don’t want to design anything retro, I don’t even want to live with anything retro – I want to design now, using the tools available now,” he said, alluding to the use of AI, and a new platform he has developed that takes his sketches straight to 3D.
“Why? Because I can’t press keys on a keyboard to make the form that I do. I can’t. So I’ve been waiting and developed it myself, an AI platform which will allow me to draw and then make what I draw,” he explained. “Darwin never said survival of the fittest, by the way, he said survival by adaptation and evolution.”
And according to Ross, the best place to be for adaptation and evolution is Dubai. “There’s a whole swathe of people who have skills here. These are educated professionals who worked for people like Zaha Hadid and who have incredible skills. And they’ve worked on all these huge projects at that level and they’re here.”
“I can’t do the work I want to do back home because it’s just working at such a sloth-like speed and the governance is terrible, and the politics is really locked in,” Lovegrove says. “Here, I don’t feel that. And you have a minister of AI who is, I think, 33 years old, I mean, wow.”