Bradley L Bowers

There’s no shortage of creatives who’ve risen to prominence on the strength of a singular look. But if Bradley L Bowers’ award-winning oeuvre has a through line, it’s not one you can immediately see.

“The aesthetic is less important to me,” says the New Orleans–based designer. Of his work, which ranges from ceramics to interiors, he asks: “Is it pushing technology? Is it pushing the concept? Is it even just pushing the genre?”

His success in Advanced Placement art classes led to a painting scholarship at Savannah College of Art and Design, where he discovered the multifaceted nature of industrial design and fell in love with it. Before he graduated, he’d earned commissions from Ralph Lauren and Gulfstream, among others. His thesis collection for his master’s degree in furniture design was exhibited at Milan’s Salone del Mobile in 2012; he founded his eponymous studio the following year. Among the items he has produced since then, his wallpaper may be most emblematic of his ethos of trying to

“make a mark beyond the reach of (his) individual projects”. He says he used the “scientific principles of the moire effect, where overlapping lines of a certain shape will create the illusion of shape and form, to create an algorithmic script” that let him “design a collection of graphic patterns rooted in science. The silk fabric that is moire is actually physically woven to mimic the scientific effect. Rather than mimic the scientific, I decided to harness the scientific while also making it attractive.”

It’s this melding of science and art that drew him to design in the first place. “Every piece of furniture, every invention or every product someone buys is some sort of synthesis of data,” Bowers says.