NERI OXMAN

Although I often find that the feminist rhetoric - not feminism - can come across as simple-minded, self-regarding, nuance-averse and reductive - biology to physiology, history to psychology, procreation to gynecology, and so on - I have come to realize that we should all be feminists.

The most beautiful products or the most elegant or seductive products, in my mind, are those that tell a story of a process.

I believe in the balance between dreaming and building.

There is a very beautiful expression in the Hebrew language that's borrowed from spoken Torah... 'All is predicted, and permission is given at any point to change anything.' I think I live by this idiom in the sense that there is always a goal; there is always something to look forward to in life and my creative search, and that goal is there.

I don't separate architecture, design, or culture. What's more important is a language of creativity that carries meaning.

If you think about it, the printing press allowed everyone to print books - it democratised the printing of information. For the first time, we could all print.

I appreciate good tailoring as much as good details of construction.

For the same reason we have the Brad Pitts and the George Clooneys, it's just part of human nature to idolize stereotypes.

We need to treat the planet as a system, and up until now, we've operated more as if the world were made of separate parts - this part is environment, this part is economy. But everything is connected. You can't fix global warming with a Ph.D. in thermodynamics!

I like to mostly wear very simple clothes.

Choice is a form of compromise, no? So why choose if you can have both?

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.

The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions, and butterflies. We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part.

The 3D-printing technology has been developing at a very rapid pace.

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

Rarely do we see immediate use of innovative technologies. I believe that the future is built by small pieces that add up.

In many ways, I think I'm still forming my ideas about my own identity in this world.

I approach the world as a whole by taking an integrative approach, not a world of parts, and I like to bring different fields and disciplines together. The same is true with my preoccupation with cultural expression.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, hand-production methods were abundant. Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.

To wear a beautiful new garment is like wearing a new idea, and I see them as the same thing. Opening my closet is a form of meditation. I pick whatever I feel is right for the day.

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

It is only through hard work and awareness that we can truly own our identity.

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.

How can we reinterpret 3-D printing in a way that suggests a new design language?

Our facial skins are thin with large pores; our back skins are thicker with small pores. One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier. And yet, it's the same skin, no parts, no assemblies. It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity.