The Cypriot-born designer Michael Anastassiades, Royal Designer for Industry and a Compasso d'Oro winner, on the iterative business of design, with the writer Emily King.
Michael Anastassiades is a Cypriot-born designer working in London. He trained first as a civil engineer at Imperial College and then took a master’s in industrial design at the Royal College of Art, founded his studio in 1994 and his own brand in 2007, and has since worked across lighting, furniture, objects and spatial design. The Royal Society of Arts made him a Royal Designer for Industry in 2015; the Compasso d’Oro followed in 2020, the London Design Medal in 2025, and an OBE for services to design in 2024.
His lighting is the work most people know without knowing whose it is: thin brass stems, plain spheres, balance held at the point where one more element would break it. Getting to that appearance of inevitability takes a very long time. He puts pieces into production with manufacturers, makes signature limited editions alongside them, and has shown solo at galleries and museums across the world, and the process rather than the objects is the subject of this conversation.
He appears at the Hellenic Centre on Thursday 10 December 2026 with the writer and curator Emily King, whose specialism is design, drawing on his recent exhibitions in Athens and Tokyo. The evening is at seven, admission £5 and free to members. What they are discussing is how fundamentally iterative design is: the versions, the returns, the long way round.