Design Fellows
2021-2023: David Buckley Borden
David Buckley Borden is the inaugural Fuller Design Fellow at the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes. David is a designer and artist known for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of art, design, and ecology. Informed by research and community collaboration, David’s work promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of collaborative art and design, David’s work manifests in a variety of media, ranging from site-specific public art installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery.
In addition to serving as a role model of alternative practice within the field of landscape architecture, teaching maker-based design research studios and environmental-communication coursework through the lens of his practice, David is spearheading a three-year interdisciplinary initiative between the Landscape Architecture Department, Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, and the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, a 16,000-acre Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Oregon’s Western Cascades Mountains.
Along with award-winning course work with students in the Landscape Architecture Department, David’s initiative includes an artist residency at the Overlook Field School, public lectures at Oregon State University, University of Oregon, Spring Creek Project, and a series of public exhibitions and installations with students and community partners including the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, Mount Pisgah Arboretum, the Center for Art Research, and the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.
David’s creative practice is supported by his critical writing with research scientists including recent co-authored work with Dr. Aaron Ellison in MIT’s Leonardo Journal, Boston Art Review, and The Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. In support of David’s public-facing projects, his collaborations have been featured in a wide variety of media outlets ranging from Landscape Architecture Magazine, Hyperallergic, Orion Magazine, and NPR’s Living on Earth.
David studied landscape architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and worked as a designer at Sasaki Associates before focusing his social practice at the intersection of landscape, creativity, and cultural event. David continues to periodically work with landscape architecture firms as a consultant, including recent collaborations with Agency Landscape + Planning, Sasaki, and Rios.
Landscape Makers, LaVerne Krause Gallery, Eugene, OR, Winter 2022
The Landscape Makers exhibition was a maker-driven art + design event featuring the work of Fuller Design Fellow David Buckley Borden and his collaborative team. The landscape-inspired work explored cultural narratives of PNW forests through interior installation, design objects, and interdisciplinary environmental-communication. The exhibition, hosted at the College of Design’s Laverne Krause Gallery, featured design-research work created by Borden and a collective of artists, designers, and select graduate students enrolled in the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Oregon. The public exhibition was also a snapshot of Borden’s ongoing creative process and input from a variety of creative individuals, ranging from forestry research scientists to artists, from both local and regional communities.
Photography by Ignacio Lopez Buson
Additional documentation and detailed project information is archived at
Tree Guard X, Fuller Initiative Land Lab, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, Summer 2022
Tree Guard X project, a series of public landscape installations by Fuller Design Fellow, David Buckley Borden and UO Master of Landscape Architecture student, Ian Vierck. The year-long collaborative project were featured in the “Oregon Experience Laboratory” exhibition during the summer of 2022. The Tree Guards were pop-art inspired reinterpretations of the ubiquitous urban steel tree guard. However, the construction, form, and material were inspired by vernacular timber-frame tradition, 20th century strategic-defense technology, and contemporary high-visibility construction/destruction barriers. The site-specific public art series captured human attention and imagination, by reframing the critical value of the tree within the tree guard. The colorway, typography, and graphic symbols of each individual tree guard communicated the story of the tree, its site context, and the greater landscape in which the tree guard stood.
Photography by David Buckley Borden and Ian Vierck
Additional documentation and detailed project information is archived at
Ghost Forests, Trustman Art Gallery, Boston, MA, Fall 2022
David Buckley Borden’s Ghost Forests exhibition at Simmons University’s Trustman Art Gallery was a collaborative art and design exhibition that explored cultural response to dead and dying ecosystems through silkscreen prints, fabric works, speculative-futures sculpture, and other interdisciplinary installation work that defied simple categorization. True to Borden’s singular creative approach, this body of narrative-driven work promoted a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology by using an accessible, often humorous, combination of visual art and design.
Ghost Forests included a variety of Borden’s recent Boston-based collaborative work including the Environmental Wayfinding System project, and the ever-expanding Environmental Revolution Flags series. The gallery installation also included a variety of new work from Borden’s Fuller Fellowship collaborations including the Arboreal Goth Cone Collection, PNW Tree ID, and Lookout Lightning Stool Lot. These Pacific Northwest-inspired projects draw on Borden’s ongoing work in Oregon, including his collaborations as a Designer-in-Residence at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Blue River, Oregon.
Photography by David Buckley Borden and Helen Popinchalk
Additional documentation and detailed project information is archived at
Ignition, Oak Street Gallery, Center for Art Research, Eugene OR, Fall 2022
Ignition was a group exhibition featuring collaborative work between Center for Art Research artists, David Buckley Borden, and two recent University of Oregon graduates, William Bonner, MLA ‘22 and Nancy Silvers BLA ‘21. Both students were awarded $4k in funding from the Ford Family Foundation as part of a $20K grant that Colin Ives and I were awarded in the fall of 2021. The funding allowed both recent graduates to develop new collaborative work building off their landscape architecture thesis/capstone projects. Borden developed the opportunity to give both students their first paid independent professional gig as they transitioned from students to emerging design professionals. Bonner’s work in the exhibition, the Atmos 44 Weather Station, garnered him an additional Oregon Cultural Trust grant.
Photography by William Bonner and David Buckley Borden
Additional documentation and detailed project information is archived at
https://centerforartresearch.uoregon.edu/fuel-ladder/
Projects
PNW Tree ID Project
The PNW Tree ID project builds off the interpretive-sign tradition of identifying trees in situ as educational program for trail users. The series specifically focuses on native tree species found in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The project’s tree selection covers a vast spectrum of species curated from Oregon’s high desert pine country to the coastal Sitka ghost forests. The series includes impressive iconic species, such as giant sequoia, as well as less known diminutive species such as the mountain hemlock.
The graphic design of the mixed-media signs (recycled oak flooring, india ink, acrylic paint, and lasers) are intended to tell botanical tales that are ancient, unfolding, complex, and complex in their realtionships to Homo sapiens.
Photography by David Buckley Borden and Ian Vierck
Additional documentation and detailed project information is archived at