Lionel Theodore Dean

Lionel graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 1987. He worked as an automotive designer for Pininfarina in Italy before launching his own studio in 1989. Lionel’s work explores the boundaries between Art and Design. In 2002, as then Designer in Residence at the University of Huddersfield, Lionel began FutureFactories, a concept for designs that evolve and mutate to create a potentially infinite stream of one-off solutions. These designs would be produced using Rapid Prototyping techniques. Initially blue skies research, the project has proved a huge success and has yielded a string of products ranging from gallery pieces to retail designs for well known manufacturers. Today Lionel focuses exclusively on digital manufacturing. FutureFactories has been exhibited in London, Milan, and New York. In 2005 one of Lionel’s pieces was acquired by MoMA, The Museum for Modern Art in New York, for its permanent design collection. From October to December 2006 Lionel was Artist in residence at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, translating digital generated forms to cast metal artifacts via reams of paper plots.