Baumer Lecture Series: David Buckley Borden

This general-audience lecture unpacks David's unique landscape-based projects that communicate environmental issues through accessible, often humorous, hybrids of ecology, art, and design.  In this talk, David shares his research-driven creative process and fluid collaborative approach to environmental-communication at the intersection of landscape and cultural event. The image-rich presentation includes a series of project case studies, including the PNW Tree ID project, Arboreal Goth Collection, Warming Warning Walk, and Hemlock Hospice. Through these examples, David advocates for new models of interdisciplinary environmental education by focusing on joyful solutions to the practical convergence of community, ecology, and design.

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. 

As a Harvard Forest Associate and Designer-in-Residence at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, David regularly collaborates with scientists to champion a cultural ecology supported by interdisciplinary environmental-communication. David is currently a Senior Advisor of Creative Practice and Innovation at the Center for the Future of Forests and Society at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry. 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, Ground Up, 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, Arnoldia, 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 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. David is a 2024–25 Fellow in Innovation and Leadership at the Landscape Architecture Foundation, where he explores the question, “How can science-communication be reimagined as a collaborative design process between landscape architects and research scientists at long-term ecological research sites?”

This event is part of the Autumn 2025 Baumer Lecture Series.

The Baumer Lecture Series invites prominent researchers and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning to present their work and to engage subjects both topical and enduring.