David is a New Zealand’s best-known furniture/lighting designer. His company manufactures and sells his designs all over the world. In 2008 the French magazine Express listed him as one of the top 15 designers in the world, and in 2012 the Pompidou Centre in Paris purchased his ‘Icarus’ installation for its permanent collection. He has designed for Cappellini, Boffi, and Offecct. He loves boats, sailing and venturing into the wild places. He aims to bring some of that love for nature back into his work. He is also an articulate writer and speaker on topics about which he is passionate: design philosophy, sustainability, and the environment.

“I don’t consider myself a designer. I don’t solve problems. I am an explorer. I am lured by the horizon: what is over there? Exploring and creating are risk taking. If you know where you are going, why go? I love to walk freely over open country, avoiding tracks. Tracks are where other people have been. They are a safe return, back to where they started. In trackless wilderness and on the ocean I can delve deep into myself and find my place in nature. You can’t will creativity, you can’t sit down at a desk and expect it to happen to order. You have to know the conditions in which it may occur, then to put yourself there . . . and wait. The truly creative is the unexpected, something you never knew existed. That is what I am trying to find, but I don’t know until I have found it. It lurks in luminal zones, between dark and light, between the elements, always on the edge. The artist wanders in this zone, seeking to escape the ‘I’, to escape human hubris. Nature is not the ‘other’, it is not something apart from ourselves. We are nature, like all living creatures, and we live in mutual dependency. There is more complexity around one small plant than a whole city tower block. So I see my role is to bring that sparkle of life into the monotonous grids of cities.”