David Buckley Borden is an interdisciplinary designer and artist working at the intersection of art, design, and ecology. Informed by research and community engagement, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of visual art and landscape design, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific public art installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery. 

David is currently a Visiting Professor within the Landscape Architecture Department and Design Fellow at the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes at the School of Architecture and Environment. In addition to teaching design-research studios and environmental-communication coursework through the lens of his practice, David is spearheading a new design-ecology initiative between the 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. David is honored to be the first Designer-in-Residence in the history of the HJ Andrews.

David was a 2016/2017 Charles Bullard Fellow in Forest Research at the Harvard Forest where he answered the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making?” As a Harvard Forest Associate David continues to collaborate with Harvard researchers to champion a cultural ecology supported by interdisciplinary environmental-communication. His current Harvard Forest collaboration with Dr. Aaron Ellison is the co-creation of a case study book, Novel Ecosystem; Art, Ecology, and Design in Climate Crisis. David’s creative practice is supported by his critical writing with research scientists including recent co-authored work 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.