In conversation with Duncan Denley

The team at desert INK share a collective vision to create exciting places that connect people. A collection of landscape architects, engineers, product designers and architects; desert INK pride themselves in their ability to use materials around them to create unique and exciting spaces. With commissions that vary from parks to temporary installations, this innovative design consultancy collaborates with Downtown Design this year to create an outdoor experience like no other!

Duncan leads his team with equal doses of enthusiasm, passion and knowledge, and is presently making serious waves in the design community. Having being involved in some of the world’s largest and most complex developments, such as The Burj Khalifa, Mall of the Emirates, Abu Dhabi Central Markets and Doha’s Sheraton Park, Duncan is extremely well-versed not only in creative design, but the technical complexities involved in such massive construction projects.

Here Downtown Design speaks to him about story telling through spatial design, challenges in creating outdoor spaces and ensuring sustainability fundamentals are followed in landscape projects.

1. What design elements go into creating an experience around landscape/spatial design?

We believe that the very best designers do not have a formula. We like to approach each space with fresh eyes, study the surrounding elements, architecture, natural environment or the existing uses of the site and generate ideas from there. Some spaces have existing physical attributes such as a great view, or a steep slope; which can be a great starting point for a design. Other spaces are literally a blank canvas, and in these cases we can afford to be more abstract with our design, since we have to create our own excitement, rather than showcasing existing site features.

2. How do you create excitement through landscape/spatial design?

Generating excitement in spaces is critical. We achieve this with a mixture of anticipation, intrigue, the unexpected and delight. In terms of anticipation and intrigue, we like using a hide and reveal technique. People always want to know what's around the corner, what is hidden from view. We are all born with curiosity and people love to explore, so we withhold an amazing view or feature from the initial entry to the space then let visitors discover it on their journey. The unexpected is obviously not easy to define since it involves presenting the visitor with a space, feature, view or experience which they were not prepared for. In turn, meeting with the unexpected creates a great feeling of delight, excitement and joy. With kids, this is relatively easy of course, but as adults we are often numb to such feelings of genuine delight. If we manage to make grown adults feel that excitement that they experienced as a child, then we consider our design successful.

3. What are the biggest challenges faced with achieving well designed outdoor spaces?

Since many of our projects these days are located on top of structures and buildings, this does present a whole set of additional challenges not present when designing spaces on the ground. We’ve learned that early coordination with the architects and engineers to align the underlying structures pays dividends. Like most well-executed construction projects, it’s all about efficient collaboration right from the start. All designers face the common challenges of balancing client expectations, existing site characteristics and of course budget but these challenges are also the fun part.

4. Sustainability is a huge aspect of your design- how do you implement this in your projects?

While there are some over-riding themes of how we achieve sustainability goals in a landscape project, such as water conservation and use of local materials, we believe that to be truly sustainable it goes much deeper than this. We are careful to avoid a superficial application of sustainable principles wherever possible. These typically occur when a project is designed as standard, before applying a ‘wash’ of sustainability principles, say, switching exotic stone cladding to local stone. We prefer to ask whether we even need the wall in the first place! If we only apply ‘skin-deep’ changes, we are not realizing the full benefits of applying sustainability principles. We prefer to look at the project fundamentals and try to generally reduce the extent of our interventions on site. So for us, it’s not just about switching exotic plants to native, but to really ask ourselves what is the purpose of those plants in a particular position, and could their extent be reduced to be more efficient?

5. Downtown Design looks forward to seeing the collaboration with desert INK come to life; please take us through any temporary gardens you’ve created in the past?

We seem to have carved out a unique niche in creating temporary gardens here in the region, which is largely due to our connections to our sister companies within the Desert Group. We collaborated with Desert Landscape and Wahat Al Sahraa, our sister construction and plant nursery companies, to create an amazing garden in Downtown Dubai for Chanel a couple of years back. At our site at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, we brought trees, palms, soil and hard landscape materials from our nurseries onto the concrete exhibition floor. We then buried the plants still in their pots within the mounded soil, laid pavers to create pathways and created a fantastic tropical landscape over a period of 7 days.

Visitors could not believe that this it was a temporary installation as it felt like a jungle. Once the event was over, we took all of the materials and plants back for use in our projects hence creating zero wastage.

6. What projects can we look forward to that desert INK is undertaking at the moment?

We’re currently in the final stages of construction at the d3 waterfront park, which will be completed in December. We’re extremely excited about this particular project as we’ve all poured so much passion and energy into the design and construction in order to provide visitors a really unique experience. We are currently also working on community designs in Dubai South such as The Pulse and Park Lane. We really want clients to call us because they have a challenging or unusual project and they seek something out of the ordinary.

To see more work from desert INK click here

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