David Gheorghita — Design leader & photographer
A figure walking a cliff edge above the ocean at dusk
Nazaré, Portugal · Leica Q3 43
departive.
Design leader  ·  Photographer

David

I lead design for 70+ people at Volvo Group — and I photograph the quiet in between.

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I've spent twenty years working on the part of design that disappears when it works.

The moment a system already knows what you need before you've had to ask — for a rail passenger who just missed a connection, a patient managing a chronic condition, or a designer finding their footing in a global organisation. Photography is the counterweight: where I slow down and pay attention to what stays.

Photography — I

Field notes, on the move.

Selected frames · 2023—2026
Tuk-tuks on a Bangkok street at dusk
Yaowarat · Bangkok
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
Two monks with an umbrella on a red bridge
Ancient Siam · Thailand
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
A vendor's tricycle glimpsed through leaves in Bangkok
Bangkok
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
Fried fish at a Bangkok night market
Night market · Bangkok
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
A Thai temple spire against blossom
Ancient Siam · Thailand
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
Aerial of a boat cutting through drift ice
Riddarfjärden · Stockholm
Leica Q3 43 · 43mm
The work

Building the operating system for how design scales.

At Volvo Group I lead UX Design — 70+ designers, design leads, and managers across Europe, the US, and Asia. What I care about most isn't any single screen; it's the system beneath them: how a function this size sets its process, grows its people, and holds its craft as AI rewrites the job. My best work is the work I can hand away.

Volvo Group Head of UX Design 2023 — Electrolux Design Lead, Digital Experience 2020 — 2023 Patents Adaptive UI & interaction 4 public The studio iOS apps Recent
Photography — II
Self-portrait
Self-portrait
Leica Q3 43 · natural light
One of Leica's 100 Photographers.

A humbling place to land for someone who mostly just points a camera at what catches the eye. The frames below are the ones that stayed with me — moments I couldn't have arranged, only shown up for.

Leica · 100 Photographers series · 2025
Featured photograph — gulls over Stockholm
Stockholm
Featured photograph — Chicago Theatre
Chicago
Featured photograph — Atlantic surf
Portugal
Portraits
Portrait — a monk in a doorway
Portrait — traditional Thai dress
Portrait in a park, late light

Every photograph is the cover of a record that doesn't exist.

Turn one into a sleeve — Liner Notes
Craft & recognition

Leadership never cured the urge to build.

At Electrolux I led interaction design across the connected portfolio — setting the Smart Home UX direction and building universal interaction models that held across product categories and brands. The principle was “learn one, know all”: consistent mental models and interactions everywhere, so a new product never meant relearning how to use it — and hardware and software components could be reused across the range instead of rebuilt each time.

Patents were an adjacent result — several filed so far, with more on the way as they roll out across markets. Four are public: a proximity-aware adaptive display, user recognition with personalised preferences, a safety mode that flags unauthorised users, and a swipe-to-set control for choosing a time or range in a single gesture. But the urge to make things never left.

The studio · Apps

Built by a small studio.

Passion projects, made in my own time — designed, coded, and shipped only when they're ready. Four studies so far; one is live.

STUDY 01
Echo / Frame

Every frame has a frequency.

Reads a photograph and answers with the song that resonates.

Live · iOS
STUDY 02
Sightline

Read the light.

Computes where the sun falls from building geometry. Offline. No AI.

Coming 2026
STUDY 03
Solplats

Find the sun.

Finds the sunlit ground in a city of shade.

Coming 2026
STUDY 04
Archive / D

Dress deliberately.

Your wardrobe, archived and composed into outfits worth wearing.

In beta soon
View the studies
Now
Summer 2026

Lately.

Echoes
Echo Frame ↗
Joshua trees at dusk in the desert
Space SongBeach House
A vintage car at a neon-lit American diner
A Real HeroCollege
A figure in a subway hall lit by luminous waveforms
sch.mefd 2Autechre
Record of the month Jul 2026
Hit It! — Vianova cover
Hit It! Vianova · LP September 2025 · 11 tracks · 45 min

A Berlin four-piece who spend the whole record refusing to be one thing — a track opens on lounge jazz, drifts through synthwave, lands somewhere heavy, and just as you'd name it, it moves again. Trying to file it feels like missing the point. 'Melanchronic' is the one I keep returning to: synth washing over a riff that finally lets a song breathe — restraint, where the rest reaches for spectacle. Forty-five minutes that never repeat themselves, and never quite let you settle.

Latest run Jul 6 · Stockholm
8.02
Distance
46:34
Time
5'49"
Per km
Riddarfjärden waterfront · ↑20 ↓32 m
On rotation
Fits Off-duty loafer
composed against The Northern Column
Objects
Colophon

Say hello.

david@departive.com
· Studies · Stories · Deep Field
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David Gheorghita departive. More is more.
Crafted in the low light of Stockholm · 59.3293° N, 18.0686° E
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