Thank you for listening to the Bloomerangas podcast and being part of these conversations.

The podcast opens up perspectives on what could come next. But how do we bring that thinking into our own work?

Over the last few months, I’ve been mentoring creative professionals looking for a new direction in this era of AI. These conversations sharpened my understanding of the challenges creatives face today.

With eight major life transitions, ten years running a design agency, and a career working with creatives behind me, I am well placed to help you navigate change and find your next direction.

I’ve reshaped the Bloomerangas membership around a simple mission: Grow your creative practice.

I’m offering three ways to help you grow your creative practice, depending on what you need.

Creative Futures · €12/month

If you enjoy the podcast, this is a way to take your exploration further. Discover future possibilities across creative disciplines and revisit the breakthroughs that shaped creativity through Design Rewinds, available to read or listen to.

You’ll also get Digital Facilitation Tools to support client conversations and reflection on your own work.

Creativity Mailer · €30/month

Working digitally can be exhausting. The Creativity Mailer invites you to explore your creativity offscreen through printed tools, inspiring reads, and hands on experiments you can try on your own, with your team, or with kids.

A mailer is sent every two months, with free shipping in the EU and UK. The next edition is coming in November. If you are a member and haven’t filled out the shipping form yet, please do it here before end of October.

Mentoring Sessions · €40/month

​AI can help you grow your practice, but sometimes it’s refreshing to talk to people in a similar situation. Personally, I find it invaluable.

Join a monthly online mentoring session in a group of up to five creative professionals. Bring questions about your brand, visibility, AI, or creative direction. Get guidance, connect with other creatives, and find practical next steps.

Explore the membership

The podcast remains free. These options are here if you’d like more support, practical tools, or space to experiment.

If you’re unsure which option suits you, reply and tell me what you’re working on. I’d love to hear.

What does this mean for your current subscription?
If you are on the early subscriber plan at €40/month, nothing changes. You keep access to all membership components at a much lower rate.
If you are on the existing yearly plan, you will receive all the benefits of Creative Futures.

The next Creativity Mailer is coming in November​
​If your membership includes the mailer, please fill in your shipping address so we know where to send it. If you don’t know whether your plan includes one, reply to this email.

Haven’t had a mentoring session yet?
If mentoring is part of your membership and you haven’t had a session yet, please book a short call with me and we’ll take it from there.


Thank you again for being here.
Adventure continues ✨
Egle

https://bloomerangas.com
https://karalyte.com

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

I talked with Cal Thompson, a designer and product advisor who led product design and research at Headspace and now teaches product design strategy at Future London Academy.

Our big question was simple: when AI lets anyone build anything, what should we actually build?

Cal starts with a coffee cup. You pick it up, drink, and put it down. Nobody designed it to make you keep holding it. Yet so many digital products now measure success by how long we stay on them, a habit borrowed straight from social media.

She has a lovely metaphor for what AI is doing to products. Picture a hammer, clear and simple, and then imagine someone adding a little bell, a ribbon, and a sheet of screen hanging off the handle. She calls these extras “user need hallucinations.” Features that sound plausible but don’t come from any real human need.

One idea has stayed with me since: designers can advocate for human metrics. At Headspace, her team tracked stress, sleep, and anxiety, and found that the early habits that helped people feel better were the same ones that kept them subscribed.

We also talked about why she paints to stay grounded, why AI has never been inside a human home, and the new engineering college in Vermont she’s helping design, where students can graduate with little or no debt.

If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to watch or listen to the full conversation, and read the write-up on the blog here.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,
Egle

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

Then, in the space of roughly fifteen years, that changed. Not because Copenhagen hired the right consultants or copied the right cities — but because a generation of Danish designers decided to build something that could only have come from here. Democratic in price, specific in personality, responsible by design. Copenhagen Fashion Week made sustainability mandatory for every brand on its schedule. Danish fashion exports grew 84 percent in twenty years.

Paris noticed. Then the rest of the world did too.

The Idea

Danish fashion has always had a problem with fashion as a system. Not fashion as clothes — that part was fine. Fashion as spectacle, as exclusivity, as a mechanism designed to make most people feel they could never quite afford what they wanted: that is what Danish designers pushed against.

The answer was something the industry now calls “democratic luxury.” Clothes that were well made, well considered, and designed to be worn by actual people in actual life.

Read more

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

I talked with Tuomas Auvinen, Dean of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University in Finland and co-founder of the university’s Centre for Radical Creativity.

The “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. For Tuomas, radical creativity isn’t about small improvements. It’s about going to the root of a problem and questioning the assumptions we’ve stopped noticing.

He starts from a simple idea: everyone is creative. Not just artists or designers. We make creative decisions every day just to get through ordinary life. The real question is whether our workplaces let that creativity out.

One metaphor has stayed with me since: the creative sandbox. Leaders set clear boundaries, and inside them people get real freedom. If someone isn’t used to autonomy, you start with a small sandbox and let it grow as they get comfortable.

We also talked about “holding leadership,” and the courage it takes for a leader to say, “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together.” Tuomas thinks that’s one of the hardest and most important shifts leaders face right now.

And for anyone who’s ever been asked to prove that creativity pays off, Aalto’s Creative Leap research found that companies with both creative people and a creative culture were very likely to outperform their competitors financially.

Aalto also runs a free online course, Diving into Radical Creativity. I’ve signed up myself, and I’d love for you to join me.

If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to watch or listen to the full conversation, and read the write-up on the blog.

Till the next time ✨
All my best,
Egle

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

Bjarke Ingels was born in 1974. He studied in Copenhagen and Barcelona, worked for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, then came home and started building.

His firm BIG — Bjarke Ingels Group — now has offices on four continents and projects in more countries than most architecture firms have ever worked in. But the thinking has stayed Danish: a building should make the place around it better, or it has not done its job.

Read more

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

I talked with Stephen Bottomley, Head of the School of Design at Glasgow School of Art and a working goldsmith whose own pieces sit in the British Museum and National Museums Scotland.

Stephen studies something called the overview effect, the shift in perspective astronauts describe when they see Earth from space. He uses it as a lens for craft too. The point was never the travel itself, it’s having new eyes for what’s already right in front of you.

We talked a lot about the craft education in the age of AI, and he was refreshingly clear-eyed about it. His take: most AI recombines what already exists rather than creating anything new. He still uses it for the boring stuff, like summarizing a hundred emails, he just doesn’t mistake that for the creative part of the work.

His research cluster at Glasgow gave students metal salvaged from a church roof that had aged outdoors for sixty years, and asked them to work with its color and history rather than melting it down fresh. That project has already had three exhibitions.

We also got into why record gold and silver prices are pushing students toward new materials, what it actually takes to develop your own style instead of copying someone else’s technique, and how craftspeople are already experimenting with blowing glass in zero gravity for future life on the moon.

If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to listen to the full conversation, and read the write-up on the blog. We don't have video from this one, unfortunately, but check out our LinkedIn and Instagram for some good reels from this talk with Stephen coming out soon.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,
Egle

Upgrade to paid membership to get full access to digital facilitation tools, Design Rewinds, the Creativity Kit, and more.

After leaving Jacobsen's studio in 1952, Panton moved to Basel, Switzerland, and spent the next four decades doing the exact opposite of everything he had been taught. Not as rebellion for its own sake, but because he had a different idea about what design was for.

For Panton, design wasn’t about the object. It was about what the object did to you.

The Idea

Panton believed that color, shape, and space could change how people feel. Not as decoration — as psychology. He worked with researchers to study how different combinations of color and pattern affected mood, energy, and behaviour. He called what he made “total environments.” The chair was part of the lamp was part of the wall was part of the ceiling. Everything was one thing.

Read more

I sat down with Patrick Collins, a sales coach and consultant, to talk about something almost every creative person I know quietly dreads: sales. His first line on the subject set the tone for the whole conversation.

“I’m not sure anybody who likes sales.”

He doesn’t think that’s a problem to fix. He thinks it’s a sign the word itself is broken.

Patrick completely reframed how I think about sales. He tells everyone he trains to cross out the word and call it education instead. Nobody likes being sold to, but people love being taught something useful by someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about. His simplest hack: export your LinkedIn network, run it through Claude, and ask it who you haven’t spoken to in 60 days. That list is almost always easier to work than any list of strangers.

The name of his new project, Unemployable, comes from his own story. Years ago, in a job interview, he was told he’d be perfect for the role, then told in the same breath that he couldn’t have it, because he wasn’t employable. He’d already pointed out everything wrong with the company’s website.

That instinct to question things rather than just do as told is exactly what he’s building a business and a community around now.

In this talk, you’ll learn more about relationship building, using AI strategically, understanding what you want, and how to get out of the 9-5 trap.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,
Egle

But when Jacob Jensen designed it in 1972, he wasn’t thinking about records. He was thinking about what it felt like to stand in a room with it.

That instinct — that a speaker, a radio, a television could be as beautiful as what it does — is what made Bang & Olufsen one of the most distinct companies in the history of design.

The Idea

Most electronics companies in the twentieth century thought about function first. The box that held the technology was a box. It could be styled, decorated, made to look friendly or futuristic — but the design was surface.

Bang & Olufsen asked a different question. What if the object deserved to be in a room even when it wasn’t on? What if the form carried the same intention as the sound?

Read more

One thing she said has stayed with me since. We’re still running our workplaces on analog era norms, in a digital speed world. That gap, more than any single generation, is where most of the tension we feel at work actually comes from.

Gen Z gets blamed for a lot of that tension. But Amanda’s research tells a different story. They’re not really asking for anything new. They just grew up with more access and more context than any generation before them, so they ask for it louder.

We also talked about what actually kills creativity at work. It’s not a lack of tools or talent. It’s fear, busyness, and certainty, in that order. Certainty is the one that worries her most, as AI gets more confident and more persuasive by the day.

Another idea from our conversation has stuck with me since: the difference between a game’s goal and its purpose. The goal of Monopoly is to win. The purpose is to connect with the people you’re playing with, think strategically, and enjoy the time together. She thinks most organizations have quietly optimized for the goal and lost sight of the purpose.

We also got into why loyalty isn’t dead, just no longer blind, what Gucci’s shadow board did for their sales numbers, and what it might take to prepare the generation coming up after Gen Z for a future none of us can fully predict.

If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to watch or listen to the full conversation, and read the write-up on the blog.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,

Egle

LEGO started as a small carpentry workshop in Billund, Denmark — a town of a few thousand people in the middle of Jutland. Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter, began making wooden toys in 1932 during the Depression because furniture orders had dried up. He called his company LEGO, from the Danish leg godt: play well.

He had no idea he was building a system that would still be in use ninety years later. Nobody did.

The Idea

The genius of LEGO is not the brick. It’s that every brick fits every other brick — and always has, since the modern stud-and-tube system was patented in 1958. A brick made in 1958 still connects to one made today. That level of compatibility, maintained across sixty-five years of production, is almost without parallel in the design world.

Read more

I talked with Heidi Rundt, CEO of Hyper Island, the Sweden-born creative business school that has spent thirty years training people in design, marketing, and innovation. Hyper Island now runs programs across Europe, the UK, Japan, and South America, but what struck me isn’t the reach. It’s how untraditional the model still is.

The school has no teachers. Instead, it works with in-house facilitators and a global network of industry practitioners who bring in whatever is actually happening in the market right now. As Heidi put it, “We actually don’t have any teachers.”

She told me about Hyper Island’s online Master’s program, run with TSAD University. It’s delivered almost entirely online for a year and a half, with one exception: an intensive first week in Stockholm called the Hyper Island Way Week, built purely so the cohort can form trust before they scatter across time zones.

We also talked about AI. Heidi doesn’t see it as a threat. “Our point of view as an organization is that we definitely see AI as a possibility,” she told me, and the program has been redesigned around it rather than protected from it.

My favorite part of the conversation was her distinction between management and leadership, and what it actually takes to run an AI transformation inside a company:

“It cannot only be allowing the workforce to use ChatGPT. That is not AI transformation.”

There’s more in the full conversation, including the Swedish military framework baked into Hyper Island’s methodology, and why Heidi believes the school has to stay as entrepreneurial as the students it trains.

Listen/watch the full episode or read the show notes.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,
Egle

That was the situation after Jørn Utzon won the 1957 Sydney Opera House competition. His entry — sweeping curved roof shapes rising from the harbour like sails mid-flight — was unlike anything the judges had seen. It was also, from an engineering standpoint, impossible. Nobody knew how to construct those forms. Not Utzon. Not his engineers. Not anyone.

He built it anyway. It took sixteen years.

Read more

I wanted to ask Ana Maria Pinto da Silva where creativity comes from. We ended up talking about something bigger: how we learn and create across a lifetime, and what we lose and gain when institutions define learning for us.

Ana is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. She’s been an architect, a world builder in the early games industry, and a UX design leader at Microsoft and Amazon. She also founded PechaKucha Seattle, after moving to a new city where she didn’t know anyone.

During this talk, we got into:

• the difference between learning and education,

• the need to reimagine humanity and how can we design the future,

• why friendship and nature are our original teachers,

• why AI, in her view, makes education more urgent rather than less,

• what a decade of building PechaKucha Seattle taught her about community.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy this visionary perspective on learning, education, humanity, and design that Ana brings.

Read the show notes on our blog.

Enjoy and till the next time ✨
All my best,
Egle

☀️ You're receiving this episode as part of your free subscription. Upgrade to receive Design Rewinds, bite-size stories on the ideas and people who've shaped design. Or go further with Bloomerangas membership for all of that, plus facilitation tools, a quarterly creativity mailer in print, and our occasional get-togethers.

Upcoming podcast guests: Amanda Schneider “Work for What’s Next”, Giedrius Zebrauskas, Chief Academic Officer at Turing College, Luca Boscardin, toy and playground designer, illustrator, and icon designer for Philips. If you’d like to ask them a question, just reply to this email.

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He also designed the chairs. The lamps. The cutlery. The door handles.

If you stayed at the SAS Royal Hotel, everything you touched — every surface your eye landed on — was by the same hand. Jacobsen didn’t hand off the interiors to a stylist or the details to a supplier. He considered it all a single problem.

The Danes have a name for this. They call it total design.

Read more

Here’s the advice Ekaterina Solomeina gives every designer who wants to be seen as a leader, not just an executor: learn the language the business actually speaks.

I talked with Ekaterina — creative director, writer, and co-founder of Future London Academy — about what actually gets creatives into the room where strategy gets decided. Her answer wasn’t “make better work.” It was: translate the work you’re already doing into terms leadership cares about.

“If you want to show that you are capable of bringing strategic value, start to understand all the language of PL, CAC and LTV, TAM-SAM-SOM.”

Not instead of caring about craft — alongside it. Present the beautiful brand and the business value it created. That, she told me, is how promotions actually happen. It’s part of a bigger argument she makes: as AI commoditizes technical skills, the core creative ones — imagination, nonlinear problem-solving, empathy — become more valuable, not less. Her hope is ambitious: more chief design and creative officers sitting alongside the CFO and COO.

Ekaterina spent twenty years as a creative director working alongside people like Michael Wolff and Donatella Versace before co-founding Future London Academy in 2013. Its alumni now lead design at Apple, Nike, Netflix, and BMW, and she also hosts her own podcast, Creative Capes.

We also got into why 80% of creatives said they’d rather work at a company under 50 people, brand as a belief system rather than a campaign, and why founders need a “third identity” completely unrelated to work (hers is Muay Thai).

If you’re a creative trying to get taken seriously at the leadership level, this one’s worth the watch. Also, don’t forget to:

• Read the blog post.

• Get the Future of Creativity report by Future London Academy & OFFF Barcelona.

Till the next time ✨

All my best,
Egle

☀️ Bloomerangas Members: Bonus Audio Session

This week's bonus audio session, "Finding Your Audience of One," builds directly on this conversation — a short prompt to help you get specific about who you're really for, and what you bring them.

If you're not a member yet, membership is a way for creative minds to stay inspired, imaginative, and entrepreneurial. Weekly audio creativity sessions, facilitation tools, and occasional get-togethers. More→

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It’s the “g” — and unlike the two-story ‘g’ most of us grew up writing, the Danish version is open, single-story, with a softly slanted tail that curls into something close to a heart. It’s not a font trend or a branding gimmick. It’s a hundred-year-old design decision, bor…

Read more

A few years ago, Dr. Chris Mitchell did something unsettling in his classroom at the Royal College of Art.

He fed the same assessment brief his students were working on into a generative AI tool and then asked the students to evaluate the output. Almost all of them said it was a pass. He looked at it again on the train home, and thought: yeah, I think so too.

His first reaction was terror. His second was more useful.

“It was a reflection of my bad assessment design.”

If an AI could pass it, he realised, then the assessment was never really measuring the things that mattered — curiosity, imagination, personal investment in the work. It was measuring the ability to compare and summarise information. Generative AI is very good at that. But that is not what creative education is actually for.

So he redesigned it. Instead of comparing X and Y, he asked students to take a teaching session that had meant something to them — personally, formatively — and redesign it, explaining why. The results were completely different. Impossible to fake. “We had examples of people drawing on learning in a choir, or a workshop around ocarina making,” he told me. “It’s just so much fun to mark.”

That moment captures something important about where we are with AI and education right now — and it’s just one thread in a really rich conversation.

Chris is Head of Academic Strategy Development at the RCA and the creator of the MA in Creative Education. We talked for over an hour about what formal education is genuinely for, why the RCA builds everything around making and reflection, how hybrid learning can be done well (and what goes wrong when it isn’t), and why creativity is something every person can access — not a trait some people have and others don’t.

We also got into the RCA’s long-standing pass/fail grading system — no marks, just detailed written feedback — and what it demands from both tutors and students.

👉 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

👉 Read the blog post.

I hope it sparks something for you — whether you work in education, whether you’re a creative practitioner thinking about AI, or whether you’re just curious about what it looks like to build an institution around the act of making things.

Till the next time,
Egle
https://bloomerangas.com

Can creativity be taught?

This is the question we explored in the newest episode of Bloomerangas with Ruta Valušytė, Head of the Design Centre at Kaunas University of Technology.

Every person has the native ability to create. But like any muscle, creativity needs to be used, trained, and nurtured. If we stop using it, it fades. If we practise it, it becomes more natural and intuitive.

What I found especially interesting in this conversation is that creativity does not necessarily need complete freedom.

Very often, a blank canvas blocks people.

What helps is a thoughtful structure: a clear task, a useful example, a safe environment, and enough freedom to experiment. Ruta describes this as a kind of creative playground: a space where people can explore, fail, try again, and slowly build confidence in their own creative process. Surely, this resonates with us very much as we create creativity playgrounds for offices and spaces for exactly this purpose.

We also spoke about AI.

AI can be a fantastic tool, but it is still a tool. Ruta compared it to a pencil: if you know what you want to draw, it can help you. But it cannot replace your intention, your judgement, or your imagination.

This feels especially important now, when creativity and innovation are so often discussed through the lens of speed and productivity. AI can generate quickly, but true innovation still requires us to question the status quo, define the right challenge, and imagine something that does not yet exist.

In the episode, we also talk about:

• how universities can nurture creativity

• why struggle is part of the creative process

• why structure and play need each other

• how design education can support a more sustainable future

• what it means to design beyond only human users

• why curiosity is still one of the most important creative skills

One of the strongest ideas from the conversation is that a creative environment is not only about tools, studios, or technology. It is about culture.

It is about the values, behaviours, and ways of thinking that make people brave enough to explore something unknown.

I hope you will enjoy this talk as much as I did. Read the full summary here.

Till soon!
Egle
https://bloomerangas.com