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

Listen and watch now on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

In this Episode

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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***

What do you mean a chair can have over 500 different iterations — by a single designer?

That’s not a typo. Hans Wegner, one of Denmark’s most celebrated furniture designers, is credited with somewhere north of 500 chairs over his career. Not 500 sales. 500 distinct designs. He’s still know…

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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…

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Listen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. See the episode transcript at the top of this page.

In this Episode

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

Hello everyone,

I am launching a new course - Design Innovation Course: Ideas that Shaped Design History - for the design lovers out there.

It is an 8-week live online course (with an optional field trip) exploring the landmark works that changed design and what they reveal about how innovation actually happens. It’s based on our Design Rewind series.

Rather than treating design as a timeline of styles, each session focuses on turning points: the ideas, objects, and visual systems that redefined what design could be. From industrialization and counterculture to AI and the meaning of craft, we will look at the conditions behind breakthrough work and the patterns that connect them.

What it looks like:

• 8 live online sessions, every Friday at 12:00 Berlin time

• 1.5 hours per session

• June 26 — August 14

• Optional field trip to the Design Museum in London and a design studio visit (studio TBC)

Pricing:

• Early bird: €275 (until May 30)

• Regular: €345

• Free for yearly Bloomerangas plan members

Register here — or learn more

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email.

Hope you will join us to explore design innovations and catch some inspiration together.

All the best,
Egle

Just a quick reminder that we have a facilitation lab tomorrow at 1:00 PM Berlin time via Zoom. We’ll walk through the digital tools and explore a tabletop version of the Bloomerangas game in its new setup.

Of course, there will also be time to get to know each other better and ask questions.

Please register for this facilitators-only event here.

…

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In our latest Bloomerangas Podcast episode, I speak with Lina Žemaitytė-Kirkman, Head of Rockit (a Startup and Innovation Centre) about something many of us are feeling right now: how hard it has become to stay focused, creative, and mentally clear in a world of constant digital input.

We explore why digital overload affects more than productivity, how boredom and rest support creativity, and what simple habits can help us protect our attention in the age of AI.

It’s a thoughtful and practical conversation for anyone who wants to feel less scattered and create with more clarity.

Watch the episode below, listen on substack/spotify/Apple Podcasts or read the summary on our blog.

All the best ✨
Egle

https://bloomerangas.com

I’d like to invite you to a facilitation session where we’ll explore a new way of running gamified workshops using Bloomerangas tools.

In this session, we’ll test a board-led workshop format that combines a workshop brief, Bloomerangas card decks, tabletop mechanics, and visible outputs to create a more dynamic and participatory facilit…

Read more

These labs are a recurring space to deepen your facilitation — theme by theme, tool by tool. Each session is 45 minutes and focused on one specific aspect.

The theme for the first session is Reading Resistance: what resistance looks like i…

Read more

We’ve just released a small but powerful update to help you run better sessions.

You can now save cards to Favorites and arrange them in your own order—making it easy to prepare structured, gamified sessions for your clients.

Switch between grid and card view, reorder cards however you like, and use your curated set during facilitation.

Want to make it more interactive?
Spin your saved Favorites in the spinning tool and explore them together with your client.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

All the best,
Egle Karalyte
https://bloomerangas.com

P.S. Friendly reminder for our facilitators — we’re hosting an online facilitation session this Friday at 12pm (Berlin time). You’ll find the login link in the Learn section. If you need any help, just email us at hello@bloomerangas.com.

80s design has been bold, colorful, and unapologetically experimental, defined by bright palettes, geometric shapes, and playful, often chaotic compositions.

Moving away from strict modernist rules, it embraced emotion, irony, and individuality—seen in movements like the Memphis Group—while early digital tools began reshaping graphic design, making the decade a turning point toward expressive and highly stylized visual culture.

Inside the brief, you’ll find:

• Key influences (Postmodernism → New Wave)

• Messaging directions

• Visual cues

• Pitfalls to avoid

• Hands-on workshop exercise

• AI prompts for bold, personality-driven design

You’ll also find the design cards from this brief in our Design Cards section so you can expand your options when exploring a design direction for your project.

⏰ A reminder: our next facilitation practice session is happening online on April 3rd at 12pm Berlin time. You’ll find a link to sign up in the Learn section of the tools website. Each session is unique, centered around a different theme, and led by a facilitator from our community. It’s a safe environment to experiment, learn, and strengthen your facilitation skills. Any questions, just reply to this email.

Read more

I’d love to introduce you to Andra Bagdonaitė, venture capital investor and Partner at FIRSTPICK — a high-speed VC fund and accelerator backing ambitious early-stage startups across the Baltic region (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia).

Andra shares insights from her experience investing at the pre-seed and seed stages, often becoming the first investor on a startup’s cap table. She explains what truly makes a company investable in its earliest phase: a committed founding team, early validation, and a clear path toward scalable growth. We explore how milestones are defined, why willingness to pay is the strongest signal of product-market fit, and how founders can think strategically about reaching their next funding round.

Before co-founding FIRSTPICK, Andra worked in early-stage investment and accelerator roles at Startup Wise Guys, one of Europe’s leading startup accelerators, where she supported emerging startups through growth and fundraising. Her journey into venture capital was not planned, but shaped by years of working alongside founders and witnessing how ideas turn into companies.

This episode offers a grounded look at early-stage investing, practical advice for founders considering venture capital, and an honest perspective on what it takes to build globally competitive companies from the Baltics.

Continue reading on our website and watch the full talk on our YouTube channel to explore early-stage investing, what investors truly look for, and how founders can turn patterns into scalable opportunities.

All the best,
Egle Karalyte
Brand Strategist, Facilitator, and creator of Bloomerangas

💡 New Bloomerangas Website

We’ve just launched the Bloomerangas website — a growing library of tools, skills, and experiences to unlock creativity and nurture your creative thinking. Designed for facilitators, educators, creatives, and team leads, it’s your competitive edge in the age of AI.

Explore

I’d love to introduce you to Jessica Dance — a UK-based artist, designer, and creative coach. In her work, Jessica combines art, business, and psychology to support creative entrepreneurs in building lives and businesses that are joyful, impactful, and financially sustainable.

In our latest talk, Jessica opens up about how, after years of working with brands like Vogue, Nike, Barbie, and Google, she reached a point where she felt exhausted and disconnected from the very work she once loved. What she realised is that burnout is often a sign that the way your creative life is structured is no longer sustainable.

So many creative careers begin organically. You’re good at something, opportunities start arriving, and the work snowballs. It feels exciting — until, somewhere along the way, you stop asking whether the pace, the projects, and the pressure actually suit you. You might be earning and delivering, yet internally feel depleted.

A big part of our conversation focused on Jessica’s belief that strategy alone is not enough. Before refining your niche or raising your prices, there’s something deeper that needs attention — your nervous system. If you’re operating in chronic stress or survival mode, even the best strategy can fall apart. You might avoid visibility, hesitate to pitch dream clients, or undercharge — not because you lack skill, but because success doesn’t feel safe to hold.

Jessica structures her work around nervous system regulation, mindset shifts, and strategy — in that order. When the body feels safe, the same actions can produce very different results. The shift isn’t just tactical; it’s energetic.

We also talked about alignment — and how easy it is to drift into “should” energy: I should take this job. I should be further along. I should follow what’s working for others. Externally, things may look successful, but internally there’s friction. Even when you take a project simply to pay the bills, doing so consciously shifts the energy from obligation to choice.

When we feel overwhelmed, our instinct is often to do more. Instead, Jessica suggests stopping — even briefly — to “drop a pin on the map.” To write things down. To separate facts from the stories running in your head. Without pause, we stay on autopilot. With it, we regain agency.

One idea that stayed with me from this conversation is that safety precedes expansion. When your nervous system feels settled, creativity flows more freely. Decisions feel clearer. Growth feels sustainable rather than frantic.

Continue reading on our website and watch the full talk on our YouTube channel.

All the best,
Egle Karalyte
Brand Strategist, Facilitator, and creator of Bloomerangas

💡 New Bloomerangas Website

We’ve just launched the Bloomerangas website — a growing library of tools, skills, and experiences to develop creative thinking. Designed for facilitators, educators, creatives, and team leads, it’s your competitive edge in the age of AI.

Access digital cards, creative prompts, gamified experiences, and online sessions to bring clarity, activate creativity, run better sessions, and spark breakthrough ideas — starting at just €8/month. bloomerangas.com

At a time when so much design feels flat and interchangeable, Portuguese design offers a warmer modernity. It shows that clarity doesn’t have to mean coldness — and that ornament, texture, and heritage can coexist with contemporary systems.

This brief builds on our exploration of Portuguese design as a living logic rather than a nostalgic reference — where azulejo geometry, cork, ceramics, Moorish pattern, Atlantic light, and layered history translate into structured, repeatable design principles.

Inside the brief, you’ll find:

• A snapshot of why Portuguese design feels especially relevant today

• Historical context — from Moorish influence to Atlantic exchange and global hybridity

• Messaging and narrative directions, including Warm Modernity and The Atlantic Exchange

• Clear visual cues and anti-patterns to guide your design decisions

• A practical workshop exercise: Tile-to-System Translation

• AI prompts to help you turn cultural cues into scalable brand systems

Read more

I’d love to introduce you to Emily Sharp — a licensed art therapist, psychotherapist, and writer whose work explores the deep link between creativity and healing.

I recently spoke with Emily on the Bloomerangas Podcast about how she blends traditional talk therapy with creative expression — helping clients unlock emotional resilience, insight, and self-trust through the creative process.

Emily explains how making art can be therapeutic, even if you don’t consider yourself an “artist.” “Art therapy is really just a form of psychotherapy,” she says. You still talk through life’s struggles as you would with any therapist, “but then you also have the opportunity to explore it visually.” This visual dimension often reveals perspectives that words alone can’t reach.

We spend so much of our lives in language — talking, writing, thinking — that we sometimes build protective walls around our emotions. Art has a way of softening those defenses, letting feelings emerge through color, shape, and movement. “The art-making process is cathartic in and of itself,” Emily says. “You feel like you can release something”from within.

In our conversation, she shares how she tailors creative tools to meet clients’ emotional needs.

“You feel more contained when I’m using pencil or marker,” she notes — ideal for moments of anxiety or overwhelm when structure brings a sense of control. On the other hand, looser, more fluid materials like watercolor or clay can “pull people out of stuckness,” gently inviting freedom, release, and emotional movement.

We also talked about what it means to balance creativity, work, and life. After over a decade in fast-paced New York, Emily relocated to Copenhagen and became a mother. The change in pace was transformative. “New York was really go, go, go… I was working a ton, and I loved it,” she recalls — but the intensity eventually led to burnout. In Denmark, she found the space to recalibrate, choosing a slower rhythm that now allows time for creative work, family, and a part-time private practice.

Life in Denmark, she notes, is shaped by a quiet trust in systems, a cultural ease that reduces stress. And that matters — especially for creative work.

“When we are in a not-stressed place and our nervous systems are settled, we’re able to be more creative,” Emily observes. In a calmer state, ideas come more freely. In her words, “taking care of one’s well-being isn’t just good for health — it directly feeds creativity.”

Continue reading on our website, where you’ll find more insights from Emily’s work — and watch the full talk on our YouTube channel.

All the best,
Egle Karalyte
Brand Strategist, Facilitator, and creator of Bloomerangas

💡 Explore the New Bloomerangas Website

We’ve just launched the Bloomerangas website — a growing library of tools, skills, and experiences to develop creative thinking. Designed for facilitators, educators, creatives, and team leads, it’s your competitive edge in the age of AI.

Access digital cards, creative prompts, gamified experiences, and online sessions to bring clarity, activate creativity, run better sessions, and spark breakthrough ideas — starting at just €8/month. bloomerangas.com

This collection features solo, paired, and group exercises. Each card invites meaningful reflection and conversation, helping individuals and teams slow down, connect, and gain fresh perspective—together or on their own.

You’ll find the cards on the Bloomerangas Tools website as part of your subscription.

Access the cards

Want to begin today?

Try this small practice from the card deck. Slow down, relax, and bring your attention to your body.

If you’re not yet a member, consider subscribing to Bloomerangas Tools to access a range of creative resources for facilitating brand clarity, team building, and self-reflection.

All the best,
Egle Karalyte
Founder & Facilitator at Bloomerangas

I’d love to introduce you to Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, founders of Formafantasma, a research-driven design studio based in Milan and Rotterdam.

I recently spoke with them on the Bloomerangas Podcast about their projects for Prada in 2025, and was inspired by the depth of their imagination and the way they approach creative work.

Formafantasma creates products, spatial projects, installations, and exhibitions, collaborating with brands such as Prada, Hermès, Lexus, Max Mara, and Bvlgari.

Central to Formafantasma’s practice is a creative process rooted in listening, imagination, and social responsibility. Each project begins with a careful dialogue that allows the designers to understand a client’s intentions and context before developing ideas that help achieve meaningful outcomes.

As they explain, the ideal collaboration is either “a very thoughtful conversation” or complete creative freedom — in which case they let ideas lead the way, allowing form and format to emerge organically from the process.

In this talk, Andrea and Simone open up about their creative process. They dive deeper into the thinking behind projects such as Prada Frames and Staging Modernity for Cassina, reflect on design’s responsibility in a complex world, and share their perspectives on ethics, AI, and working with brands in more meaningful ways.

The designers are “interested in [an] expansive understanding of design” and have developed the capability to execute ideas in whatever format best fits the context. By not limiting themselves to a single niche, they avoid getting pigeonholed.

“If we are depending only on one way of approaching design or one type of client or one context of working, I think we would be very much limited by the clichés that are inevitable in any kind of work,” they note. Instead, “this variety of works allows us to work on projects that we like, to skip the ones we don’t like, and to maintain a certain degree of flexibility and independence”.

One standout example of Formafantasma’s work is their ongoing collaboration with the fashion house Prada. Prada Frames originated from an open brief: prior to the 2020 pandemic, Prada approached Formafantasma with the intention of participating in Milan’s Salone del Mobile in a new and more innovative way. Rather than mounting another product showcase, Prada wanted to move beyond that format and create something more intellectually engaging. After several iterations, the concept of Prada Frames took shape as a traveling symposium series.

Launched during Milan Design Week, it consists of interdisciplinary talks and conversations. “We did not want it to become a celebration of the individual author. It is transdisciplinary – we involve anthropologists, philosophers, architects, designers, but also policymakers, writers,”. Each year, they choose a critical theme and an unconventional venue that reinforces the topic.

“It’s rare to find a partner with which you can construct a thinking that is lasting for a very long time”. This underscores a core theme in Formafantasma’s work: the most fruitful brand collaborations are those that give designers room to explore big ideas and invest in outcomes beyond immediate marketing gains.

Continue reading on our website, where you’ll find more of FormaFantasma’s work — and watch the full talk on our YouTube channel.