Ross Lovegrove on working with AI: ‘The potential is, I think, utopian’

'I’m getting older and I want to have an interesting life, says 66-year-old industrial designer Ross Lovegrove. 'I want to be engaged in really contemporary, of-the-moment things, like space and AI.'

It’s why Lovegrove was particularly excited recently to be invited to collaborate, for charity, with the Polaris Dawn space project on a reworking of his 'Go' chair for Bernhardt, this time repurposing shockwave data from the SpaceX mission launch to create a seat-pad pattern.

But even creatives boldly going where no die-cast magnesium has gone before get brought back down to Earth: one of the UAE-based designer’s latest projects has been to help the Portuguese architectural hardware company JNF face off plagiarists; design rip-offs have, Lovegrove stresses, become endemic. 'You see the copyists at the trade shows, scanning new products with their phones,' he laments. 'I understand the demand. People are under financial stress and most don’t have £10,000 for a sofa. You see a lot of the copies in Dubai – everything is just a bit off, you know?'

Lovegrove’s solution? To provide JNF with the inimitable: a collection of door handles in his signature biomorphic style, but 'impossible to make with any other process' than the combination of digital data, enhanced laser sintering and hand-finishing used here. The results – which arguably move the door handle more into luxury territory –have already scooped him a 2025 German Design Award.

That Lovegrove is willing to take on something as seemingly mundane as a door handle – while simultaneously working on a confidential project for Google DeepMind and another, ‘Ridon’, a sculpture in Carrara marble for an exhibition next month (his first foray into sculpture, created in collaboration with a robot) – speaks to the diversity of his approach. He says he will have a go at anything, 'But I pride myself on not doing anything retro,' he laughs. 'Retro is awful.

'You only have to look at retro's impact on the auto industry, for example, which has run out of steam now. I’m not a futurist either. I just don’t like static things but do like things with an embedded animation to them. I’m a sculptor of technology,' he adds, tongue firmly in cheek.

But since founding the design agency Deond in 2023, he has been pulled closer still to the cutting-edge. Lovegrove still has his own projects, 'that fit 100 per cent into me', as he puts it, 'but Deond is about being part of the absolutely now culture – and that’s AI.' Indeed, Ila Columbo – his partner, in life and business – is an expert in the field, and Lovegrove has been converted.

'Anyone of my generation, and my skills base, would be skeptical of AI [and its role in design]. I’ve seen a lot of wonderful [AI-generated] imagery in my time and wondered how [the works] would actually be made,' he says. 'But I think instead of moaning about the impact of AI it’s better to get on the horse and ride it. Feed my body of work AI and you get wonderful things out. AI is complementary, like having a conversation with a very intelligent friend. But you still need human input. We still need to be part of the process, but the potential is, I think, utopian.'

Certainly, he enthuses, he is finding a more progressive outlook in the UAE – design-wise, at least – than he did back in the UK. The West, he suggests, is slower to move and more resistant to change. In contrast, a can-do attitude and the desert landscape are providing a new set of local design challenges to get his teeth into, from sustainability – check out Deond’s recent Enfold Pavilion at Dubai Design Week, made of recycled cardboard nodules and inspired by a palm tree trunk – to major infrastructure projects in a region beset by scorching heat and a lack of water.

'You just have to stay interested in everything, in whatever is around you,' says Lovegrove. 'And if someone says I’m an “interesting designer” that, for me, is still the greatest compliment.'

rosslovegrove.com
deond.com

Image 1 of 12