S2E16- The Origins of Brit Cool and The Creative Community We Need Now

Welcome to a conversation with a true pioneer in elevating the best design in the world. Piers Roberts offers profound reflections on the distance we've fallen from conscious consumerism and where to go from here with a strong emphasis on uplifting neurodivergent ways of thinking.

For over 20 years, Piers has played a significant role in contributing to East London’s success as an inspirational beacon of creativity and innovation. He launched Designersblock in September 1998 at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, 5 years ahead of the London Design Festival. He went on to develop and produce major Creative Festivals in London, Milan and Tokyo covering design, architecture and illustration. Over 19 years the pioneering and much imitated event showcased over 4000 creatives from 38 countries in 65 events across ten countries.

Piers has written, curated and produced critically acclaimed conferences in Creativity and Entrepreneurship for Southbank Centre, the Oxo Tower and Europe House.

This interview is one of the nearest and dearest to my heart so far in my time hosting this beautiful podcast. It's a true gem and I'm immensely honored to be able to share it. 

Here's what you'll hear (and more:)

• How DesignersBlock ignited a new wave of UK design by repurposing empty buildings for creative shows
• Why neurodivergence is often a hidden driver of visionary creativity—and how it’s misunderstood in traditional systems
• The origin of the term "creative entrepreneur" and how it emerged from economic scarcity and DIY culture
• What it was like to be on the outside of the mainstream design world looking out, not trying to fit in.
• How pioneers often get dismissed in their time, even as their ideas are widely adopted later.
• The emotional toll of being a creative who is early, original—and overlooked
• How burnout, wintering, and wellbeing are essential chapters in a creative life
• The dangers of reducing creativity to metrics, and the value of nonlinear thinking in solving complex global problems.
• and a lot, lot more

References:

Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson, Ross Lovegrove, Simon Pengelly, Jan Van Der Lande, Hella Jongerius, Richard Hutten, Ineke Hans, Casper Vissers (Moooi), Sheridan Coakley (SCP), Konstantin Grcic, Matthew Hilton, Andrew Purves, Terrance Conran, William Morris, Judy Singer, Catherine May, Joanne Limburg, Martin Evans, and more.

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Actual People, a Podcast
www.chaunceyzalkin.com

Transcript

 I knew that Piers Roberts started something remarkable in the UK called DesignersBlock because in 2010, I was a part of it. That year, days before I got married , I was in London curating a group show of handpicked female designers and artists called What Women Make. This was kind of like the pinnacle of that period of my life where I produced this group show as part of a larger show called Designer's Block and I was surrounded by just immense talent  throughout this venue and throughout the city of London. it took place in a disused building south of the Thames. it was filled with industrial designers, furniture designers, lighting designers, inventors, artists, all of the highest order as was the entire show across the city called the London Design Festival.

And I can assure you, nothing in the US is as great and unlike Milan's Salon Del Mobil, which is this  very impressive global center of design. Everybody goes to Salon del Mobil to shop, and it's absolutely amazing, but  the London Design Festival is very different the Salon Del Mobil feels more like a trade show in its centrality and immensity but this feels more like a celebration of   talent, and it really brings the city to life. It's not like a  craft fair or a trade show of just commercially viable things like you'd find at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York, or like the Atlanta Gift Show. This is about the highest aesthetics,  visionaries, and  the entire city is a backdrop supporting this goal. And the UK has such a strong, beautiful history of maker culture William Morris and the arts and crafts movement to Terrance Conran and his playful conceptual design aesthetic. And in this interview you'll get to hear a bunch of just these luminary names of people from London and from all over Europe that Piers Roberts has touched in some way . What I didn't know about  Piers  and DesignersBlock in all of British design is that it fit into a larger narrative of a fight for creative freedom and individuality.

And I'm taking a break from politics this week to share this amazing interview with you. I'm positive that you will learn a lot that you did not already know no matter where you sit in terms of your exposure to the design world, and if it's nothing, this will be utterly fascinating. If you are deeply entrenched in the design world, this will be utterly fascinating.

Take a listen. 

I  know anything about design at school. Creativity was being good at drawing and it was also seen as very much less than the hard subjects of maths and physics and chemistry and things like that. 

Within the schooling I went to, which was the English public school system.

Mm-hmm. 

It was all about you are creating the leaders for the future. the public schools were set up in order to create business leaders and people that would oversee the empire, and this was drawn from 5% of the population who were from that social class at the top so all of these ideas around patriarchy, male leadership, white power, all of these things were part of the system that was about educating 5% of the British population to rule the world. 

 Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic.   

Yep.  Okay. That tracks. 

 If you take boys into an all boy environment, then what do they know about women?

If you take boys into an environment that's very hierarchical and  especially 13 to 18 based around bullying, which was absolutely all the way through, then you create the foundation for the officers in the Army who won't mind sending their men into battles where they'll die and of course, you know, when you're looking at women's role it was about producing boys to send to battle to win wars. 

I saw The Wall by Pink Floyd. 

There you go.  

You know? Right. 

How fucked up it all is and, and you know, sort of, it might, I mean, does 

that, isn't that resonate with you? The Wall. It's really 

Nice to hear you say it because I mean,  it was incredibly viscerally different to anything else when the wall came out  immediately it triggers 

I mean, for me, boarding school was all about brutalism and trauma.   The woman who invented the term neurodiversity, Judy Singer, she has a little catch phrase. She says, the schoolyard bully could identify autism for generations. Did you know I was diagnosed autistic? 

Mm-hmm. 

But yeah, you see, this is one of the things that really helped to make things make sense.

You are not the only person that I know from the UK that I've spoken to recently that is a creative, brilliant person who has also been recently diagnosed neurodivergent and that has helped her  a lot of these things are also superpowers. 

Yeah. And the superpowers is a sort of curious label because  people will say, well, what's the point of having a superpower if nobody will give you a job? in order to use your special skills the wellbeing side is really crucial because part of the sort of getting out of the DesignersBlock world and all of that was the realization that mentally I was completely screwed up. And you know, the stage at which you had the breakdown is not entirely clear, but the sort of persevering and the self-harming behaviors and the confusions and the not being able to generate work and the sort of realizing the little triggers that have people go he is a bit odd. Maybe it's easier to leave him alone when you created the bloody world that created their space in order to exist.  This is what's incredibly nuts about the work we did at DesignersBlock was how prescient it was and how much it led the way, and how things that simply didn't exist and now of course you do that. 

Like what? 

That was a time when I think the creative as entrepreneur, the term creative entrepreneur didn't come about till then. It was a sort of designer maker. But  the social factors that led to what I were doing were, um, 

what were you doing? because now I'm recording for a podcast.

So just tell me, 

okay, 

what did, like, give us a, a background on what does DesignersBlock? 

So designer's Block was the desperate attempt to salvage the investment I made into the most exciting shop that ever opened in the old Truman Brewery and created the spark for East London and super cool spaces and things like that. 

 I invested what was the equivalent of a 120 square meter apartment in EC1. It's worth a few million into opening a shop that would bring together all the work of the designers emerging in the late nineties from the UK, the Netherlands in particular, and Scandinavia.  And what I saw was  coming from a social science background of a generation looking to do something hopeful, optimistic, and a little bit punk ethic in a way.

That created this new design thing. The factors that drove that were the economic recession in the nineties there wasn't really much money around the moving of manufacturing out of Europe to China, which went there weren't manufacturers to produce your work and a simple fact that the reward that you got from designing stuff for a manufacturer or brand wasn't all that great so the terms of business weren't great.  So without investment, without manufacturers, without a good reward model, if you've got the same number of graduates coming out of design schools as exist across the entire UK industry,  what do you do? You do things for yourself, you invest in yourself. This is where the idea that the creative becomes the driver of their own business begins. You had the fashion work 

because they were disgruntled or not getting the work. There wasn't enough work. 

They didn't have enough choice. And   contemporary design had become quite boring in some ways, and you could probably say the same now, but there was a sense that contemporary design fitted  well.

Okay. So 85% of contemporary design coming out of Italy at that time was sold in Germany  so in April you had the Salone del Mobil  where you presented the ideas, and in January you sold them at the International Furniture Fair of Cologne. And so the season for a contemporary design was Milan for ideas January in Cologne for sale.

So 85% was being sold. So you had family based manufacturing in Italy backed by Milan being the center of publishing so you created the magazines to tell the story, and that's why it's so crucial. That's fundamental difference between Milan and say Torino. And then you've got family based retail and distribution in Germany so the whole thing was based around a business model of family to family Italy, to Germany but what came later was all sorts of other countries then going, oh, we quite like the idea of being contemporary design. And you've got the beginnings of what becomes creative exports as soft power. People think of Britain as super cool, or they did until Brexit when it's suddenly nose dived but up till that time, it's because of the, you know, the, the music, the fashion, the art.  Design, which didn't exist as contemporary design in the uk. It just didn't exist in that period except for a tiny, tiny, tiny margin suddenly began to come a about. So you had your Ron Arad, your Tom Dixons, your Jasper Morrisons being famous designers employed by these manufacturers and brands abroad,  but there really wasn't a mark.

What year, 

what year did Tom Dixon and that group become just the height?

The mid, the mid, the mid nineties you're talking. And what do 

you think, what made that change?  Because when I came I was like, oh, this is all, there's so much design in the UK.  That's how I felt. And I was there 2007, 2008. 

I said this,  

they're the me, me, it's me. But that would be slightly exaggerated, but I definitely had a part of it. So what changed?  IKEA came around about that time and suddenly you had contemporary design that's cheap coming from Ikea. And they had a whole marketing strategy, an advertising   campaign "Chuck out your Chintz" So up until that time chintz, old velvet fabrics, dark sofas, heavy stuff, carpets.  This was what the home was about and when you're  talking about the    British elite, this was antiques. This was shooting grouse. This was leather patches on elbows. 

I can't help, I can't help but connect this boarding school, bullying patriarchal thread and heavy design  a coat of arms the legacy of your family. 

No, no, no. You're absolutely going to the right place.  You are  talking about the shift in  the British story   pirate Radio came about in  the sixties.  There was radio Caroline that was based on a ship    two to three miles off the coast of Britain  the territorial water stopped there.  They  used these old structures   built in the Second World  War when they wanted to bomb London, the whole of the UK was in blackouts, so no lights on, no curtains, everything dark.   

So Guy Maunsell had the idea that they should build these structures in the Thames that would have great big guns on top  

 These towers became where young guys would create their own radio stations, and this was known as Pirate Radio

this was the first time when kids were going, we're bored of the BBC. The BBC is the voice of Britain. It's all received English and welcome to the Queen it was all about Britain controlling the narrative.  The upper classes It was about the you're looking at the beginnings of the off and claiming for independence  when you are looking at control systems Britain isn't this  wonderful place of freedom. Britain is emerging out of the war, having to rebuild, voting for the Labor party ' like actually the war has affected everybody's life we should be looking at social democracy as a way forward, where we look at health and wellbeing and housing and all of those sorts of things, but it's still fundamentally a conservative country with a small C and a Big C, small C old ways of thinking, big C, politically dominated by the Tory party forever... The pirate radio was the first attempt to say sod you!  We want to tell our own story. We want to play records that are coming out in America, which aren't getting airtime on the BBC, and we want to do this. And of course then they had to exist outside the territorial waters of the UK in order not to get locked down  

I grew up on the movie Tommy?  

Yes. 

From the who and  the wall, my mother  had an English boyfriend for 20 years starting in my childhood, and his father was a World War II test pilot, and so I heard a lot of these stories  about boarding school  from him.  I have a general sense of this I think of it as  later on the Manchester sound. 

Yeah. That 

came after Margaret Thatcher.  

Yeah. And you know, and, and all the time, you know, all the way you are going through, you are looking at these pockets of resistance, this attempt to do your own thing and there's is that whole heritage. So you've got, yeah, you've got the punk era, you've got Vivian Westwood and  

Exactly.

And then you get the fashion industry In the nineties,  and this is when the young British artists were coming about. Then you had this idea of Brit Cool.

And Tony Blair taking it up, who came into power in 97. And then in 98 the term creative industries is coined. That's the year that I began, and at the time there were about three contemporary design stores in the uk.  

 so This whole podcast is about trying to understand where to thrive in the creative industries that's what  my big question is what's going on with them and what we can do next, and what happened to things that started to get lost, and now I feel like you're a key to understanding this.   Tell me a little bit more about the time that the term creative industries was coined.

There was a labor MP called Chris Smith who is probably the only MP who really wanted the job of DCMS, which is Department of Culture, Media and Sport.  And in the years running up to the election of Tony Blair in 97,  there was an attempt to say, look, there are all these industries that if in and of themselves are quite small, but  if you add them together becomes something quite sizable. And this includes advertising, design, architecture, film, fashion, all of these sorts of areas. 

furniture design

arts all that. 

Yeah. Well, the arts and craft movement, I guess, would be in that. So craft heritage things, things of those sorts, which again, you can  trace that back to the  1850s and liberal attempts of, uh, of progression. And so the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement and, and all of these, I mean, 

there's a legacy in the UK of beautiful design and creativity. Yeah. 

Which really you see now in terms of craft brewing high quality butchers, creatives running their own business. But this is creative people deciding to invest in themselves. I.  This is creative people saying, nobody's going to invest in me. They don't understand my ideas.

They're not willing to give me a good deal. I better do it for myself. But the emergence of the creative as the driver of business comes with the work that I guess I'm doing in that period. Because when you're looking at fashion and art, art has always had the distribution model or where it's dominated by galleries, and fashion is about magazines and high-end couture and models and sexy, sexy photography. 

But the idea that designer coming up with an object that isn't as boring as the shit we're being offered, isn't as dry as the contemporary design that's coming in lots of places and is more quirky and interesting it is being led by the Dutch and then it's in the UK.  You've got Tom Dixon, who was absolutely a pioneer. You had Ron Arad and Jasper Morrison being employed by the bigger  brands and doing their different things but the Dutch were definitely leading the way and there were interesting things going on in Scandinavia. So we were picking up on stuff happening in Sweden and Finland and to a certain, and Norway was still behind  Norway, would start to invest in contemporary design from around about 2000, 2001.  Until that time, Norway had always basically been an agricultural economy that hit wealth when it hit oil in the North Sea  but those things have happened really, really changed.

But the idea that you are looking at contemporary design as a way of signifying cultural values within the nation is very much there. So there was a  one called Penny Sparke who was at the RCA and she wrote a book  about how you photograph design and how that represents different philosophical approaches.

So she would say from the ceiling, you would hang a bit of Italian design that would suggest it's sort of philosophical foundations and how it was all about expressing aesthetic idea. And you can already see the body movements coming into the way that it was done. Mm-hmm. With German design, which was about function  you would photograph it from the front.

It would show how it works. So, you know, sort of, this is how it works. Here are all the knobs and buttons. Mm-hmm. Whereas in Scandinavia, you would photograph it within the home, which was about suggesting that contemporary design was about the quality of life within the family and in the home 

and Britain didn't really have very much because we didn't buy any. The only contemporary design that was being sold at that time in the UK would be in a business that wanted its front office to look like it was progressive and its boardroom to look like it was doing something interesting, but nobody had it in its home.

There were no showrooms for contemporary design that would be sold to the architectural community that existed at the ground floor because there was no ground floor audience. You would only be on the first floor.  And there were like three or four contemporary design stores. If you had money, you bought antiques.

What were those big design stores then? We're talking about the late nineties  

 Conran was the main one. 

Mm-hmm.  

Um and of course his influence has been phenomenal. Across the whole British design. He then created Habitat, which is a kind of spinoff  that was cheaper than Conran's. 

Mm-hmm. You've got Heal's at the top of Totten Court Road. And Totten Court Road was always a sort of center for furniture.  And the, so that springs off of Oxford Street. Yeah. , and there was a guy called Andrew Purves who had a shop called Purves and Purves, which was probably the only place where you could do contemporary design if you were somebody like me making furniture and saying I'd like to sell it in a store, they were just about the only ones. And then you had SCP, which is Sheridan Coakley products. Who was the first person to produce design by Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic  uh, Matthew Hilton.  These sorts of characters.

The characters that become the sort of main players in that top 20 designers that every brand uses because then it's easy for the marketing people to sell. 

Yeah.  

And this was happening around, but that, that was about it. You then look at East London and East London was well you've got the City of London, which is the richest square mile in the country, if not in the world, apart from Wall Street. 

And then next door to it, you've got two boroughs of Tower Hamlets where the Truman Brewery is and Hackney, which becomes this super cool place.  And they have for a hundred years been the poorest boroughs in the country. So you have this sort of next doorness of incredible wealth and incredible poverty  and Brick Lane has been the.  stepping off point for immigrants for 4, 500 years.  And there's a building in Brick Lane that has been two types of Christian Church, a synagogue and a mosque. And it's the only building to have served all three it's still there  it's basically Jewish owned and it's Bengali occupied now,  it's also where there was a famous Cable Street riots in 1936 or something like that when Oswald Mosley, who was attempting to be the Hitler  of the UK took a great big marching rally up through Brick Lane with all these Jewish immigrants and all the Jewish immigrants took their pots from under their bed  and threw them over the heads of everybody and they dispersed and it still celebrated this sort of wonderful rejection of fascism from within an immigrant  community in 

We need that here.

We need that here now. 

Yeah, you do. But  I'll try and tell you, God, the American thing is odd.  And you're not allowed to comment on it if you're not American, are you? You get abused. 

What? That's not true.  

Don't you think? So? You usually get No, 

I think that we need, we're desperate for, for help. 

Of course you are.

And support 

and emotional support. 

 Yeah, and it, it is, it's really sort of, I mean, I know we're off on another tangent, but I mean,  I'm progressive  but you're left with a sort of binary choice, and I think

what we try. Yeah. What I try to do sometimes is to understand those who I don't understand so where do I go in order to try to figure out what's going on? 

We're so big and we don't have neighboring countries we can learn from  and hear their languages.  Europe is almost city state in its geographic makeup, so, it has a forced  exposure to other cultures. People do not travel. They're not exposed to global cultures.

There is a real failure in our educational system. 

Christian. Christian as well. I mean, which seems shocking. The degree to which Christianity. Oh yeah. 

We're very puritanical culture 

with  

a lack of education and exposure to critical thinking about the world and no global context  they use religion as a proxy for information and data and it's really toxic. I live in the south now and  I have become over time, I notice resistant to religion where  there was some more of a place for it for me, you know, Christianity now, I, I bristle at it. It's, it makes me uncomfortable religion 

Isn't it crazy that something is amazing as  discussing the meaning of life and what happens to us and the stars in the universe comes down to essentially  narrow parameters of what you can or can't do within a social community. And  it's dictated  by the bloke who's wearing the right collar.

I mean that stuff came from you guys with Calvinism and 

well, of course, of course 

that's your fault. 

You had the  town and you had the squire, who was the country gentle person who oversaw the area  the younger brother would become the priest. The older brother would inherit the estate and the younger brother would become a priest.  If you've got  less scope to spread information, then you end up with local areas of control and organization.  This was run by the upper classes who were the landowners and then everybody did what they were told or were corralled into that.

And then you had the priest that said, well, if we need a view on morality, then we need to do that. But of course, that separation and integration was quite a fascinating way of creating social order. And what we have at the moment is the failure of any system to create a social order that allows for the autonomy that maybe people are desperately after. 

For divergent views. because now it's all on a binary. You either think this or that, and I don't feel like I'm fitting in as much to either one.  

This is why binary to me is the fundamental issue. And then we're going back to Silicon Valley where everything is written in binary code. We definitely go down and my own work is called . And Trinary is like one plus one is three, which is like one and the other. And the relationship between the two. So it's like the ying and the yang seeming opposites are interconnected and interdependent. Order and chaos. Too much order or too much chaos both lead to chaos. 

Where we are right now as a society we're very uncomfortable with that nuance and gray area 

 I want to take it back to the late nineties and the coining of the term creative industries and how DesignersBlock started as a result of that, or along with that and how that honestly ties into the way the creative industry has gone a little bit awry as of late. And  how you think we can get back on track and what role maybe AI plays in that or doesn't play in that, and how that all sort of ties into the social structure and  people feeling out of sorts and disconnected and poor and fed up and all the other things. 

Okay. Um. To me, it was coincidental that I opened my shop at the same time that the term creative industries was coined, but maybe it's not. There was certainly social factors driving changes that I picked up on sooner than anybody  and did something about,  and when I look back on it now, being autistic, I recognize that it was an autistic trait to see things before others. 

I imagined everybody else could see this, and I didn't realize that they couldn't.  But that's quite a strong autistic thing. I'd also worked through what I might like to do in all sorts of layers and detail, which is kind of what sometimes critique for being obsessional thinking. But if I hadn't done that, would I have come up with this idea?

Would I worked out to place it in an area that would become the perfect place to strike the match that lit this whole east London becomes the coolest place on the planet, and it's all about youth and ideas  exciting stuff  having a go and making use of empty spaces but to an extent, I understood that and I had all sorts of layers in my thinking that drove it.

To a certain extent, I was incredibly blind to certain things. I really didn't know how to run a shop. I didn't really know what I was doing. It wasn't like I'd been working in the sector for ages. I'd got involved with a big show from a museum in Cologne that opened in January 96 that was called Highlights Design from Great Britain at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst  in Cologne during the Cologne furniture Fair,  and. 

Um, that's what got me to meet this new generation of designers that were coming through. There was Inflate. There was  Jan van der Lande  there was Tom Dixon, there was Simon Pengelly there was Ron Arrow, Jasper Morrison, all of these sorts of characters, Ross Lovegrove and all of these sorts of people. And they're all in one place.

And the world was very small, so you could run a party, which I would do in due course with a hundred people, and you would have everybody in the sector in one place. It was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.  Um, but it also meant it was very condensed. There were very few publications that were out there. The Guardian did a little guide on a Friday, we would talk about it. Elle decorations sort of existed. Blueprint was the main magazine, and they were the ones with whom I partnered in order to get people to come along to my shows.  But the Truman Brewery, instead of this sort of 11 acre vibrant, everything going on, all these things that happen was empty, apart from about 200 people that were either artists doing bits in fashion,, lots of music producers and performers.

So I had people like Talvin Singh DJing for me and we'd wander up and down Brick Lane and there were all these extraordinary characters that were there in this tiny little space  because the world of contemporary London cool all existed within this really condensed little space.

And I just thought, isn't that amazing?  and I thought, well, I'm never going to be a designer because that's not how I work.  Maybe I could do something to promote this. And I thought, isn't it obvious? Surely if I open this shop, everybody's going to go, wow, isn't that amazing? Then they go buy all my furniture and they'll make lots of money and it will be great.

And so I sort of expanded, expanded, expanded it until it became this 250 square meter two and a half thousand square foot shop and exhibition space that blew the world away. It absolutely, totally caught  fire in terms of people's imagination. Wayne Hemingway who started Red or Dead, was doing a breakfast thing with Chris Evans who did the big breakfast and every week he'd come to my shop to get things out to display within his, this is Contemporary design is an exciting bit, and every week we would be having our work picked up by the magazines.

Graham Norton, who's ridiculously famous now, bought his very first contemporary design from my shop, and he'd sort of come in and get. Oh, I didn't realize that to wait six weeks. So he ended up packing away his thing, giving it to him, and then he'd did this beautiful cover on Radio Times draped across.

He was very successful. He was on a Marc Newson, the first bit that Marc Newson ever did that was like spun plastic. And so these were, you know, Marc Newson goes on to be number two at Apple under Jony Ive as a designer, and he was doing his very first design product in the UK in my shop in this area and he was based out of Australia and being picked up in Japan. 

I'm so glad that you're sharing this. This is so, I didn't even know all of this background and it's awesome. 

This, these are, this is an incredible time and I ran this party and everybody came along and I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, here am I, I never go to parties because I don't know what to do and I don't know what goes on and I became the world's greatest design festival, architecture festival, party organizer number one.  And if you looked at the, like the, 

but you were just going on pure instinct, 

right?  It is pure instinct. But you also, because I've just been given a talk about being neuro divergent and you know, the qualities that come with that.

And we were kind of trying to assess what were the autistic qualities that you normally get disparaged for that were crucial for me to be able to do what I did at that time and through those periods. I originated the idea of using big empty buildings for shows. There was no property developer that had ever used a building for public shows.

There'd been the occasional fashion show, 

like the popup shop. Like is that the precursor to popup shops? 

It's the precursor to popup shops and popup. Yeah. Could be there.  Before the development you run a range of activities in order to landmark the space, in order to bring public in, in order to talk about the plans, in order to reach out to the community and ask what you are doing.  That had never happened. So the T building, which is Shoreditch House which was ......... First people they ever did shows with me. City of London, richest organization in the world, first shows they ever did me, they got me along to negotiate for them to have something with somebody else. And I sorted out the entire thing between two parties and at the end of it, they turned around and they said, oh, well  if we ever get anything weird come up, we'll get in touch with you again. And I'm like, I've just fucking sorted everything out and you still call me weird and dismiss me.  Oh, okay. So that also goes back 

to before we were recording, you were talking about anybody who's creative has been dismissed  I wanted a 

t-shirt once that said everyone hates a pioneer. because they do, you know, they think they like pioneers and this is still the case. People think they like pioneers, but they generally like pioneers 20 years after they did the really interesting stuff. 

I was always a pioneer and  I would complain that things weren't working out for me. And my dad's like pioneers they always come back with arrows in their ass, which is obviously very racist.

So I don't think I, I wonder if I could say that in a different way, but from his context of how he grew up, you know, like obviously like that's not exactly how we'll always 

look at you and they'll say, what on earth are you on about?

I was the very first person who did street style blogging.  I had this thing called Girl on the Street in my twenties. I had a team of women all over the world, young girls who would write about stuff. But mostly I did. I take pictures, this huge digital camera on the street at Fashion Week and  people on the street . I hand coded HTML and there was no blogging software. And as soon as Blogger came out, the first blogging software, I stopped.

I said, oh, now everyone's going to do it. Forget it. And I never made money off of it. And other people came and made money and I didn't.  And I was really frustrated by that. I don't talk about it very often because I don't want to seem dated or bitter. But I was a pioneer of street style blogging  that kind of cultural reporting on the street. I wasn't totally accepted into the fashion world. Exactly. 

I was like kind of like this weird girl that did this stuff and I didn't have a real place, but I had followers and people who liked what I did, but it never turned into money. Yeah, I was very early. I was very early. 

You do need a different mindset to be the main player in a market than the mindset that.

Is good at being the pioneer and you do, and people who can do both. That's quite remarkable,  I think. And you think can do both.  There are people who can do and, and also I think you can learn from it as well. But  you can get paranoid about it. I mean, there were opportunities that could have come my way, which because I was fearful of everybody nicking what I was doing I didn't go along with, and I didn't know how to  form  the commercial relationships that could have led to me being a superstar all over the world. But there were definitely the opportunities, especially in Southeast Asia, and I fucked them up. And again, that comes back to a sort of autistic trait of going, I don't understand what's going on. I feel that people are taking my ideas. Nobody's giving me credit. Obsessionally  going over and over and over and over. And then B bang, crash, smash. Destroy and then you get the meltdowns and the breakdowns and the pain and the hurt that comes with all of that, the trauma. What was the 

smash crash that happened to you?

Probably around about 2004 I've been doing a London Design festival for five years and then the London Design Festival comes along and the last thing they want is to pretend that I started it.  So I'm already being excluded by the people who are coming along in order to run the London Design Festival.

I'd find out years later, somebody would say, in order to run a festival, you need the three Ps and the three Ps of politics, patronage, and partners.  And of course, I hadn't got a clue how to deal with the politics and the people who'd run the London Design Festival with totally politics.  I didn't have a clue how to do the patronage and get the sponsors, the people to pay for it they would know more how to do that. But the partners the kids growing up going, how do I do my thing? What am I going to do? How's this going to do? I designed the space where they had the peer group learning.  Everybody saw creators being unable to do business where one plus one is three, you can be creative and you can do business and the relationship is incredibly vibrant and exciting. But by and large people in business go, oh, it's all very well having these ideas, but business is the serious stuff.  And so creativity is trivialized within the decision making of organizations that have access to resources

and this is still the problem that we've got today, is that in a world of uncertainty, people think the answer is to create more order and control.  2008 was a massive change when you are looking at these shifts, because it was the end of the time of experimentation. 

That's when I met you.  

Just when things started going wrong.

Uh, sort of.  

 You might be interested in my impression?  2010 is when I did designer's block  

right. 

Yes, 2010 and then I left Europe after that. They're not correlated. It, it, it was actually a necessity that I needed to, to work and I had to go back to New York, 



My impression was that designer's block was the best of the London Design Festival, the most edgy, most interesting stuff and that's why I wanted to be part of that.  I love the London Design Festival, but the big, big venue was the more safe, commercialized stuff.  There was a lot of great stuff  from other places too, yes, but designer's block was  beautiful things and interesting things  that light of fire under me.    I have a visceral physical reaction to the things that are very ugly  I get   headaches and nauseous with ugly things.  I can't be in a very corporate office with fluorescent lights. It causes  a depression. When I found that kind of design thread in different cities, that hit the right spot for me I felt the sense of hope and optimism and like, this is where I want to be. I get  energy from that and so it makes me sad to hear that that was sort of taken away from you or that you felt like you didn't quite fit in and that  it takes fitting in because that ruins it.  I mean, I find that to be   📍 the pinnacle of successful life is things are very beautiful and creative and have that spark and if it's missing, I think that it signals something very bad for society. That might sound like an overstatement, but I really feel like that's true.

Well,  

I mean, firstly, thank you. I mean, that's a beautiful way of, because it, it is been quite hard. You know, when things fall apart, often  remembrance of things are formed by how they end. If things end badly, then we imagine the whole thing was bad and we forget how beautiful and extraordinary and amazing how impactful it was. 

Well, how to end badly.  

Well, it's just that you carry on for too long and  you're fed up. And there's no more buildings left and nobody cares. And it was actually Sheridan Coakley I remember one day turning around and going, oh, you know, your, your show for young designers. And I thought that's just about the most trivial thing that you could possibly say to sum up DesignersBlock when it had all these layers.

But if a brand is what people think it, it's, then we've reached that point where the differentiation and the layers had become blurred. It's a bit like you've got this beautiful, lovely sort of cast copper thing and somebody's rubbed it with  metal wool for ages until all the edges have gone.

There were so many beautiful edges. Layers to what we were doing that I don't think people understand. The motivation for doing the show partly it was from Milan. So Milan had the trade show in the trade hall and the ideas in the city,  and that's the starting point for every creative festival ever since. Milan, that actually developed out of developing social housing from different political backgrounds actually, and then became the design fair. But that's another story. But the idea that you would have the trade show and then complement it with the ideas in the city was what I was learning from. We had ... 100% Design that was  the design show.  The international journalists, and if there were any buyers, would come to London at that time because that's where this, what is this Brit cool? Who are these young designers? What are they doing? Where are they going to be? They would come to a hundred percent design because 

Yeah, that's the big venue, right? 

The biggest venue that we had at the time, which was, yeah. And I thought, well, that's the obvious time to do this other show.  So I'd opened this shop. It'd been absolutely amazing. And I realized within a few weeks that we were going to go bust because  people were going to come and they were going to love it.  Say, it's the most amazing thing. They weren't going to spend the money.  You really only have a few weeks before you suddenly realized that you are under this incredible financial pressure and it's all going to go horribly wrong. 

Here you are a fool again, an idiot Again, a mistake again. And you can't live on the basis of people saying This is absolutely exciting, and then buggering off home and nothing happening. So are you just going to sort of create this wonderful firework and then it all dies and then you are in poverty and you really depressed or do you fight to do something more? We were going to have this Dutch show within the shop for the London Design Festival, and it was Casper Vissers that was going to do it, and Casper Vissers would end up running all of the Dutch designer,    Marcel Wanders. So the whole Marcel wanders  thing is Casper Vissers  Casper Vissers coordinates this show, which has   got  people like Hella Jongerius, Richard Hutton, Ineke Hans I mean you, you're talking about the most exciting designers  of that generation in one space.  And then the, the, the lift didn't work very well and I thought, bloody hell empty the shot's going to be a pain.

So I turned around for the family who owned the Truman Brewery and I said, well, you're doing up that big building over on the other side of the estate, could we do a show in there at this time? And they said,  yeah, okay. They'd never done a show like that before.  We were the first contemporary store in the old Truman Brewery.

That's now known for what  

it's known for offbeat shows. Mm-hmm.  Quirky stores. Um, and it's huge. It's 11 acres. It's vast and it does incredibly well. It's still using all the buildings that were part of the Truman Brewery. And there's still like 

that's, that is the building where there's all these like market stalls downstairs and stuff, is it?

Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't in that building. It was in another building that wasn't, but it was in there. It was the first time it opened up Dre Walk, which is the road that's got coffee shop and all the things, and they had 

these three different black paintings or something on the wall.  

These are all there.

Yeah. Yeah. But at the time it was just empty buildings.  Just empty buildings. So again, we could What year is 

this? 

98. 

Okay. Yeah. 

So I said, how about we do this?  I had a PR chap called Martin Evans and Suzanne Hyde. He used to be head of PR for The Body Shop that went over to America,  he's now the most leading character for advising major property companies on pre-development and all of this. He is extraordinary character, lovely character. He said we should deal with Blueprint to get the people along.  We opened in may or June. The show would come in September and when we opened, we had no idea we were going to do this show and this show would be the show that would change the world and give me work not very well paid  for the next 16 years, but turned me into a super cool kid, cover a magazine stuff   I spent  between probably June and July, up until September, pulling together all this work from Sweden, Finland, UK amazing stuff, just extraordinary. It was   like if you put every single person pretty well of that generation in one space at one time in a building that completely reconfigured what shows in big empty buildings and festivals is about, it happened in that show, and we'd had a rubbish summer. And then on September, whatever the 20th, or have you,  4,000 people showed up to the Truman Brewery and they went OH MY GOD And Talvin Singh was DJing and things like that. We had people went into one of the exhibitor's room, undressed,  folded their clothes, climbed up onto the roof, naked and danced.  

That's how you know you're a success.  Exactly. 

You  know, obviously Right.  Boom. Just the moment. And we then had four days of glorious sunshine and people would come down Brick Lane on a Sunday to the Sunday market and that was the only time they would come.

because people wouldn't have gone there. They just wouldn't. And then they came across this show and Blueprinted advertised it and promoted it, and it became this extraordinary thing. And all the international people that had gone to a hundred percent design, well, what do we do with the rest time? They came over and they saw it and then suddenly there was this amazing thing. 

But one of the logics that was there within my head, which I guess people forget about because it's so common now, was  I wanted people to believe in the possibility that something that they knew nothing about might actually be more beautiful and more special than anything they'd come across before which is kind of the whole point of design, isn't it?  You question things, but then what are you going to offer in its place? And that's why I love it, because it's has to offer something.

Right.   It gives you  that hope and that feeling. , okay, there's something there.  Years before that fashion was my thing. When I left New York and moved to Paris, I already had it in my head that I was starting to be more interested in housewares and design than I was in fashion design. 

Do you know why it was that you sort of were shifting that way? 

It's so long ago, but I had written it on a piece of paper that I didn't care about the same things I used to care about. I was about 30 years old and I left it on my desk  I was at an ad agency that had  these two factions,  I sat next to someone from the old guard and she wasn't very friendly . The two groups did not get along. Yeah. And I left this little journal open with what I had written on it, and the next morning when I came in, she was a lot friendlier towards me. I noticed it and I looked down and I thought she must have read 

this.  

There was some vulnerability in it.   She changed her whole demeanor ever after,  had something about design and the physical object so I know I thought that way, but  I hadn't moved to Europe yet .



I might ask to an extent.

I mean, you know, because fashion is very much about how you present externally and design is about what you bring into your home and how you live 

  I was more interested in  creating my environment 

  I think that there's something very different about the characters that we're doing products and furniture than there was from people in the fashion world. 

Yeah. How would you define that? 

It's very performance and design you kind of maybe get these slightly more introvert curious people and then they go

it's more intellectual. I think design is more intellectual.  I was interested in fashion in the first place because I liked couture and I liked street style the two different things, because it expressed who you were. When you're   in your twenties, you're figuring out who you are and that interested me and I think because I'm in my thirties at that point, that I'm interested in  a philosophical foundation in the design of the object.

Yeah. And again, that's just, 

I'm also was a trend spotter for a career and I grew up in a household where my mother was very interested  in the object. We had a lot of  beautiful objects in our home. Mm-hmm. 

Nice. Which, which I didn't really have. For me it was this sort of shocking alternative.

because I think through my twenties I was sort of, you know, I'd come out of public school and went, whatever the answer is to how things should be organized, it definitely shouldn't be posh white men so I was looking at everything else and I think this fascination with other is something that stems from there.  I think that's something that, you know, you've referred to a little bit. It's like everybody's obsessed with themselves and their own group and building walls and not looking at other, and to me the fascination with other is the most. Driving beautiful, extraordinary thing in my life. And I'll make mistakes, I'll get things wrong. I'll explore, I'll maybe realize that I've sort of gone too far and maybe I would like to come back into a comfort space. And that's sort of all right. there's a project that I want to do called Cross the Line, which is how do we cross the line to meet the other and how do we see that? And and it was partly came from the school next door where my son was, was like, it's ridiculously mixed. There wasn't a single kid in that year who had two white English parents  incredibly diverse. And we say, we crossed the line to go into the school and all the kids mixed.

And then we crossed the line, we come back out and we all go into posh white European,   poor white and Black and then within the black, African and West Indian or second, yeah, people go back 

to their enclaves .

Some people find it difficult to cross the line and at a certain point we have to accept that that's okay.

You know, some people  are very easy crossing the line and they're really curious about it and some people really struggle with that and they need that sort of emotional support of people like them 

or they don't feel welcome there's also a vulnerability

I don't think it's very exciting or interesting to constantly stay in your own comfort zone. 

Well, to me It's incredibly dull. Yes. And also very, so I was looking at a sort of name for something called on the outside looking out, because I'm on the outside because I got pushed to the outside. It wasn't a choice. I was on the outside. It was very obvious to them way before it was obvious to me. And so somebody say, so you are on the outside. Are you on the outside looking in? And I thought for a moment, and I thought,  Uhuh, oh, why would I look in? It's boring, it's dull. I mean, I'm on the outside.

I'm looking out.  So again, when we're looking at our pioneers, they're often people who have been excluded, they've been pushed to the outside. And then you are using your fascination with what else exists beyond that space, and you are using the natural abilities that you might have as an autistic person, maybe a pattern  thinker. 

You can connect things in curious ways. You are interested in lots of different things, not just a sort of vertical silo thinking.  So you make connections that others don't, and that's where the really interesting stuff happens is when something that works for everybody else that doesn't work for you, you reimagine in a way that nobody else could have conceived of.

And then reveal that,  and this is what I was doing with DesignersBlock in doing the shows,  and this is what I think the whole neuro divergent community has to offer and is already offering and has so much more to contribute, is forced to the outside. You do something really fascinating and then maybe you bring it back or maybe you go like.

Fuck you. You know, I'm not doing this in order to satisfy your desire to allow me not to feel quite as miserable and traumatized by living in your neurotypical world, I'm actually going to do it for myself.  And when I talk about this, you know, it's like this is 15 to 20% of the population. That's a pretty big niche to market services towards who are currently being let down by the provision of services that aren't empathetic to the needs of neurodivergent people. 

I don't know if I'm 

neurodivergent. So you keep talking about being neurodivergent and, I do relate to almost everything that you are saying. I, I suspect I have ADHD and I've been told by my therapist, by two therapists that I should get that checked out. I'm very overstimulated and yeah

I wouldn't be all that surprised. I mean, that's partly why we get on and I find that, yeah. 

I'm, I everything you're, I'm like, yeah. I like conversations where it's like a ping pong boom, boom.  We are scraping the culture and l we are so interested. A lot of people are just not like that. And I have, I don't, I don't think I've fully accepted that people just aren't that a always as curious or as cerebral. 

And I tell you my favorite metaphor for being autistic or a HD and it comes from a woman called Joanne Limburg who's written this amazing books. I advise people on books written by neurodivergent people about. Being neurodivergent or coming to realize it. And this didn't happen 10 years ago. It was all medicalized versions of us, which, you know, we could talk about. But there's a one called Joanne Limburg and she's written a book called Letters to My Weird Sisters on Autism and Feminism.

And I got to meet her afterwards and she's wonderful. And she has this metaphor for being autistic. And she says, imagine a map of the UK   on it. Put the A roads  and the A roads are how neurotypical people go from place to place. That's how they communicate.

That's how they get places. That's the way they go. That's how they understand it. It's all, you travel on the A roads and you get from place to place.  As an autistic person, you don't have any A roads.  What you've got is a whole bunch of B rows, back rows, funny little lanes, cul-de-sacs, narrow tracks, strange little wandering places where youve  off and do things.

And then what you also got is a few super highways.  So. I will get told off because they're going, why can't you keep up? Why are you, what, what are you doing wandering down there? Why are you doing all, you know, can't you keep, can't you see how it is? And I go, but don't you realize there's this amazing like little bit of,  there's a bird down there that's migrating and it's fascinating or, or there's this little waterfall and if you go down that track and you turn, it's amazing.

And that's how I go. Maybe 

they're the neurodivergent ones, 

they're the odd one.

john Lennon said, " People who aren't weird are really weird"  

right? That's I'm like thinking, wait, wait. Maybe. I think feel like,  

why do we have to always submit to to you? And this is again about dominant cultures. And dominant cultures presume that we're all the same because dominant cultures work in a certain way. They tell anybody off who doesn't fit within that, they then prioritize and promote people who are the same, which results in cognitive bias and you know, sort of why they're so boring because they're not self-critical, so they don't even realize that. And then if they're going to be nice to us, they think they're being really kind. The worst thing you can do to somebody who's normal is tell them how boring they are or you know, or how you know they're not being kind or something like that.

because it really freaks them out. But they don't realize how obstructed we are in a neurotypical world because we don't travel by a roads and they don't make sense to us and if we say I don't understand it, they assume it's because we're thick whereas we might be saying, I don't understand it because you haven't actually thought about it and there's a lot more subtlety to it. 

Somebody  hurt my feelings once, this was such a long time ago, but sometimes it comes up. A guy I just talked to him at a bar and talked to him one other time on the phone or something  and I was preparing for an interview or something and. 

I was probably in my late twenties or very early thirties. And he said something like, maybe you think that you're sophisticated and smart and  have these great ideas, but really you're just full of nonsense and nobody understands what you're talking about because you're not making any sense.

Something. I might be, I'm getting it wrong, but that's how it sounded to me. No, no, that sounds, and then I thought maybe he's right, like maybe I'm making no sense. Maybe I'm, it's not that I'm clever, but that I'm convoluted and I don't know what I'm doing.  But do you understand that like I just, because I was 

trying completely, what's happen is again, you know, you. 

You are exploring layers and subtleties that aren't apparent to others, and then you are being blamed for exploring those things. And  because it 

confuses, it confuses the listener. 

Yeah. And they, they really don't get it. And they think that conforming is the most crucial role. I mean, social conformity is the thing that binds neurotypical people together and which has these people going, well, I'm not like them, am I?

I'm like this. And then you get your tribes and you get your walls, and then you get your divisions, and then you get your, your conflict. And this is all supported by zeros and ones 

 There's two things I want to ask you, 

one is what are you doing these days? And the other one  is how do you see the design and creative world now? 

What I'm doing now. I had a period away.  I have a son who was born in 2010. He's actually now going to secondary school in Italy and it's beautiful and it's given me a bit of space.  Catherine May who wrote a beautiful book, the first book I read about being autistic and her discovering it also wrote a book called Wintering and Wintering is, you know, they say, how are you? I'm fine.

How are things? They're great, but they're not always are they?  And we might go into a wintering phase, and when DesignersBlock came to an end,  I needed to recover. I needed to  look into my own mental health. I needed to focus on the things that were important. And you know, you're sort of desperate to come out and say, this is me now.

But actually you need to hibernate. You need to reflect. You need to heal. You need support, you need help. You need to understand what's going on. And for me, you know, in business we talk about  personal wellbeing,  and yet then you're told to leave that at the door and go to work and perform until you break.

Mm-hmm.  For me, wellbeing is foundational for the future. So if we're talking about  the future and what I'm looking at, I think partly it's talking to people about how you make your relationship with self better.  I talk a lot. I mean, this primary idea is like, you know, beyond the sort of binary world. So binary is self and other In this world, there's a relationship self with self and self with other. 

What's your relationship with self ? When I teach at universities, I do bits running MA at Kingston for part of it. So that's one of the things I do. And I was doing a bit an MA in University of the Arts which is a super place as well. But you discover that for a lot of the students, the relationship with self was not good.

You realize this is happening a lot, and partly it's because other has told you that there's something wrong with you and you've internalized it. One of my favorite writers in the States who is writing around South Louisiana and a lot of it's about male violence and inherited violence and things like this is James Lee Burke  and he wrote a line in this book, he has these incredible lines.

He wrote this line. He said, do we become the person we see reflected in the eyes of the other?  I think when you're told so often that it's your fault. That you are wrong, that you are bad, that you are stupid, that you are making mistakes, it's your fault  do we become the person we see reflecting in the eyes of the other.

And so often when we don't fit within a system that requires you to sit still, socially conform, read and write all the things you're required at school, this othering of people who are neurodivergent in that school space is already incredibly damaging. Whenever you read anything about people's lives, they refer to trauma.

Trauma exists, and again, it's like when you come up with something that's amazing, people what you want about it,  it's really hard. And when I was doing these extraordinary things and people weren't understanding. I said, well, you better justify it then, or you've gotta do that. Or Who do you think you are?

Well, well, we'd like you to do something amazing, but we're definitely not going to pay you. Or can you come and tell us loads of your ideas? And then you go, okay, okay, here you generous, generous, generous. And then you go, so will you pay me? No, no, no. We've got everything we need now you can fuck off. And then they go and take your ideas and run off with them and you see this happening. And it happened to me and it was really difficult because you are doing these amazing things  and you're trying to support a small team. You can't get the business because you notice this little switch goes off in people's head that goes, you're having a conversation with them, you know their organization, their whole operation only exists because of ideas you came up with and they  find you a bit odd. 

So that's quite difficult. So I'm coming through with other things.  Creativity I think is still the most crucial thing that we have to hold onto for the future but who are going to be coming up with those ideas? I think a lot of people are talking about the threat of AI to creativity, and I'm not a big fan of ai.  Anyway. I mean, I think it has its place in terms of solving various challenges but I don't think it adequately replaces creativity.

And I think that creatives realize that it doesn't. And in fact, creatives are probably the most secure in their work and carers are possibly more secure in their work. Because AI isn't going to be good at caring, hasn't got any of the human emotions, and equally it hasn't lived through those human experiences that you're talking about with your daughter of, you know, sort of things going wrong and needing to pick yourself up.

And that's where the, that's where the, the extraordinary stories come from. 

but I just read something about this woman and it's creepy  she's decided to program some  AI to be like her recently departed husband so she was able to have one last conversation with him. That sounds awful, but   using AI as a proxy for humanity because it's this amalgam of things could trick you, just like the algorithms do into feeling like you're having a human connection. That's the scary part.  Well, they've not proven to be very good, you know, robot carers or, or what have you  you know, the, the tech bros have been telling us for years, after years after years that they're going to solve all of our human problems and they've managed to fail on every single occasion and come back and said, well, if you give us more money and if we use even more resources, we'll end up doing something that might actually feasibly be occasionally useful. And you're kind of like, you've let us down every time in the past, and here you are back again telling us that we need  to believe you. And then you are using your position to try to manipulate governments into creating regulatory frameworks that allow them to steal people's creative output. 

You know that if you feed back information that comes out of an a AI machine, the large language model, if you feed that back to the model in order to learn from within two or three feedback loops, it creates utter gibberish. If you ask AI to produce a text, it produces a text and you look and go, oh, that's really good. In order for the AI to be able to create that information, it needs to be fed with other stories. Yeah. Yeah.  If what you feed that machine is the output that's come from the machine within two or three generations, start creating utter gibberish so they're employing humans to write  answers to questions that will never be seen, because that's what the machine trains upon.

So  the machine can't work without us. No. Right.  And  obviously there'll be people saying, well, in due course it will be able to, but  they keep saying this and then  all this stuff about  this. Trying to create a regulatory framework that says that in order for them not to be allowed to scrape all your information off the internet and use it within its language models, you have to opt out.

They know that people won't opt out because they won't get it or they're lazy or, or what have you.  If you had a scheme that said you have to opt in to say you can use my information in order to do it, then nobody would do it. because why would you want them to?  But they're then pressuring governments to say, the law needs to say that for somebody for, for us not to use somebody's personal information.

They need to have advised us through this particular regulatory framework that they don't want us to, it's because they know that they will then have access to far more information because people won't opt out. It's like, you know, reject all cookies or acceptable cookies, right?  So they're relying upon this and then they're saying to like the UK government, I think Google was saying, and I could be slightly wrong, so don't sue me yet. 

Or, you know, there's a, there's a suggestion that they're turning around to the government and saying, well, you know, do you want us to invest in your country? How about you create the regulatory framework that we want? Now, you know damn well that, you know, this is kind of behind Elon Musk thing with, with Trump at the moment.

If he knows that, if he can be seen to be the difference between him being a president or him being locked up in jail,  Elon Musk can come back and say, right, I want this in, in return,  and we know that this is kind of what's going on.  We know that works. It's always worked that way.  Yeah. And when people have donated to politicians, in order to gain influence and to create the regulatory framework that allows them to make enormous amounts of money, was again, the the contracts we want.

Do we trust these guys? The answer is no. Of course we don't. No. Yeah. You know, and you're saying, we don't trust Trump, but what about all the people who are waiting for Trump to be in power so they can then get away with what they want?  That's the only reason they're supporting him. because they know he's a complete idiot and he's definitely not the voice of  the future of energy, which is what  used to be important to Elon Musk. 

It's, it's very convoluted, but what does this mean for somebody graduating from Central State Martins today, for example?  RIS or  person.  There's part of me that doesn't know quite so well because I'm not as involved in it. I guess there, there have been a few things that have slightly shocked me. The generation that I was involved with and came up through DesignersBlock have done very well.

But that's within a tide that's been rising. So, you know, they, they got going, they created businesses, they, they've risen. Has the next generation learned all of those lessons? I'm not sure they have.  Because I think the people that have been successful haven't seen any reason to teach the next generation.

Why would they? They're going to keep it to themselves.  I don't think colleges are still teaching creativity and entrepreneurship in a way that is as good as it should be, in my view. I think it's still  something that you only think about when you leave university.

So you're going to university and you don't think you need to deal with that. And then you come out of it and you go, oh my God, I need to do it. Where do I do that? Like how manufacturing and distribution  yeah, understanding those relationships, understanding how do creative businesses actually work and what are the different roles and responsibilities  .

 And also I think at university you are very much encouraged to think about your own ideas and then you go and say, do you like my idea? Do you like my idea?  One of the things I'm saying to people is that I see more successful businesses coming from people who are good at exploring a need, possibly for a niche, and saying, can we do anything to provide for that?  There needs to be a dialogue between different skill sets and mindsets, and that, I guess, is what I'm looking to do within my Trimary framework, is to demonstrate how those different segments need to be in dialogue in order to develop an idea till it becomes a really good idea. What's even more interesting is you realize there's something more exciting that's a possibility that you hadn't thought of before, so I talk about an approach led methodology rather than an outcome led methodology.

An outcome led is where you marshal the resources. Everything stays in a straight line  and gets there. Well, that can be seen as the most efficient way of doing things.  What if it blinds you to all the other factors that you would discover  I've now got a role running a unit for an MA at Kingston University which is about project development in the creative arena. So people have come from different backgrounds. There's going to be Chinese students, Indian students, European students, whether any British, there weren't last yet, but it is going to be helping them to think through that process.

And the unit is essentially a third of their.  So I'll be leading on that and that will be teaching them design thinking methodologies. And it will allow for me to, um, come in with my own  methodology, the trainer methodology, which I got really nice feedback from last year, and so I'm evolving with that.

There's a sort of linear space where everything is fixed and certain, and there's a nonlinear space where little differences can make a big difference, and where they're challenging and questioning but we tend to prioritize order, control certainty, and in an outcome led, you know, no make it fit this thing. Mm-hmm. The classical science says everything is linear. Everything is structured. We know this leads to that, but we know in the non-linear space that the butterfly effect little differences can make a big impact.  In design or in innovation. The little difference can be the difference between it being a fantastic success or it being a complete disaster.

 It makes me think of cinema right away  cinematography or tone or lighting.  Music All can completely derail a movie or a show,  sometimes it's just that one thing that can completely make or break a story.  Sometimes you can't define it right? Precisely, but that's the whole point about the nonlinear spaces. It's harder to define. People  go, can't you define this creativity? And you're going, well,  it's pretty difficult. This is what I'm talking about, where I find it difficult that you have to have the data.

And I've been at agencies where it's like the data. The data I, I don't want to hear anything  you have the data behind it. And I think it has to be that kind of liminal space where there's data and then there's intuition and there's a mix and you have to try things out. Sometimes you have to try things out. 

Well, there's a chap called Sidney Brenner who won the Nobel Prize in 2002. And he did this sort of wonderful speech which is quite famous called, called Nature's Gift to Science, which was if nature didn't have a order within it, we wouldn't have a hope of discovering what the order is. He did a line it was basically we're drowning in data, struggling for knowledge. You can have all the data you like. But you can be overwhelmed by that data. Does it actually tell you anything? How do you interpret it? Have you  asked the wrong questions?  Sometimes too much data can be a problem.  It's almost like a stick with which to beat the people that are working with intuition and feeling and they're going, well, if you can't back it up with data, you can't do anything.

And even I went to University of the Arts and I was saying, look, there's this really interesting thing going on, which is your university is attracting a huge proportion of students who are neurodivergent. So you must be doing something right, but what are you doing right? And you don't know.  And they're saying, look, there seems to be a link between creativity, entrepreneurship, and neurodiversity. 

They said, well, where's the data? And I said, well, that's what we need to find out. That's what we need to go and explore. Well, if there isn't any data, then we can't do anything because without the data, you know, because if we're going to, well, that's how a scientific hypothesis comes about through observation.

And then you go and prove that. Theory. That's the scientific method, isn't it? That's sort of saying, unless you, you have a hypothesis, we're not going to check the hypothesis. And I'm like, but that's why we're exploring the hypothesis is because there's enough good reason to explore the hypothesis, right? 

Based on,  look at how we're telling this story.  You must be doing something right. They see neurodiversity as a problem that needs to be fixed, and they'd like a pill to deal with it. I'm saying a lot of kids are benefiting from an approach to education that you offer at these creative universities that isn't available prior to them getting to university.

And for the first time in their lives, they're receiving an educational approach that suits their way of thinking and being.  If we understood that and linked that to their being, them being neurodivergent, we would then have a case for taking that type of educational approach to kids that haven't made it to university or who've been excluded from schools or who  might benefit. The nonlinear is where we're exploring challenging questions. We then take those insights and we bring them back and go, how does that impact upon our, our knowledge? Now, the people are all about certainty and order and control. Go.

Can we stop doing all of that questioning? Can we just get on with being forcefully right about what we believe you're going? No, you still need to spend more time thinking about it. What we're really saying is that there needs to be much more of a relationship between the two of respect for the two and understanding of the differences between the two. 

Rather than what we have at the moment, which is that prioritization of let's control and order everything so that everything does as it's told and everything works efficiently  and you're going, the danger of doing that is that you carry on with. Things that have worked in the past, but probably don't work as well in the present. 

And then you're using creative skills in order to persuade people that they should still be interested in something that's already long past sell by date. 

What do you think? The world will be like  the creative world in the next 10, 20 years. What are some things that you see coming  for the creative industries and just creative people in general ?

Creativity is often a response to shifts going on in the wider world . When I was talking about DesignersBlock emerging from within that social context, the social context that we're looking at now is one where there's a growing sense that we could be facing quite significant catastrophes. And whether that's because of our actions that these things are now coming back to bite to us  our actions are creating a more volatile world.  Volatility, uncertainty, complexity,  ambiguity.  This is growing in the world. When communism failed, there was this belief that, oh, great, everything's going commit to being capitalism and democracy.

And then 2008 comes along and it shows that that doesn't work  📍 either. So we're left with this void.    I think that we need  creativity to think not just about  nice things. , it's  going to need to be employed to think through  very complex challenges  where ambiguity is part of it.

 You can't deal with ambiguity without exploring the subtleties,  and you need creative people to do that.  The danger of being too linear and forced into repeating what we've been doing in the past is its capacity to just shatter. 

 And if you look at the financial sector, it's like, no, we carry on. No, no, no. Nothing to see here. And then it shatters.  There's somebody who was saying,  how do disasters happen? And they said  slowly to start with, and then very, very fast.  And I think more and more people are concerned that the system doesn't work very well.

Where's the imagination to how we're going to organize society in future.  We are talking a little bit about what got me a little bit fed up with DesignersBlock,   to start it was  this new way of producing stuff and the new types of things.  Conscious consumption.

It was like, let's buy something that's really nice not too often, and it will last. It'll last in the imagination. It will last physically.  Then consumerism came along, just swallowed it all up.  And then you're back to the too much stuff. I mean, you can produce beautifully designed clothing, but what if it's destroying  the planet?

It's not good.  So the challenges that we're facing now and the vulnerabilities that we're facing now  are coming at us in all sorts of directions. You know, we know that we can't consume this way. The planet is biting back. we're going to have wars about water before too long when people don't have access to water.

You're going to see migrations happening with hundreds of millions of people wandering across. I think it's pretty scary and I know that that's not what everybody wants to see. I mean, I was in Italy and I was looking at this sort of shopping mall and you just see all these people wandering about just buying more stuff  and , you know, the plastic card still works.

You just tap it and then you go away and they're only buying sort of gray, black and blue. It's like, it's exactly what they're wearing already. Why do you need more? Why? Why are we, why are we doing this? What is it that has us believe that somehow this is like  in any way sustainable?  We're still being fed the same old solutions for  not feeling great about ourselves,  and then going to buy more stuff, and then discovering that the satisfaction lasts for even less time and then we've got even more shoes in the cupboard.  A lot of marketing  starts with not what's the need and how can we provide for that, but how do we manufacture in people's minds the sense that they're failing and therefore they need this thing that we can then provide them as a solution 

manufacturing consent. Yeah. And that's been done by creative industries  in lots of ways as well.  There's nothing, right, about creativity that's  great if it's being used to simply forward behaviors that are so destructive in the longer term.  What can we turn our. Creativity and joie de vivre about beautiful things towards  without killing it we need community rather than consumerism and you are living in the land of the individual. And for me, you know, this sort of fetishization of we are individual. The freedom of the individual has actually made us incredibly vulnerable to the marketing of organizations that know how to prey upon us.  We just don't need all of that. But we do need connections.

We do need that. I agree.  again, the tech bros. We'll use tech in order to solve all the health problems. Well, you won't. What you need for health is sleep, diet, exercise, and then connections and spirituality.  I went camping with my kids last weekend, and the feeling I got was one of almost  ecstasy  just lying on a hammock, looking up at the trees, it felt like the same or better feeling than what I'm looking at a beautiful thing that somebody has made. This is better than a five star hotel. We just had a little tent and a little fire. That's all we needed. Got a 5,000 star hotel when you're sleeping under the stars. But isn't it crazy, you know, we created a safe city by filling it full of sodium lights and now you can't see the stars. But our whole sort of journey into wonder and exploration and understanding of the questions and, and all of that beautiful stuff over  hundreds and thousands of years came from looking at the stars. Now you can't even see them. We've all been enclosed in this sort of shield  📍 obscuring everything that really matters.  We need to think creatively around how we reengage with  📍 ourselves