•Brands That Can’t Afford to Be Boring

Gucci, Nike, Issey Miyake, and Google don’t come to a designer for a safe answer — they come because the safe answer is a business risk. This talk goes inside the work: what these clients actually ask for, how a creative team defends an idea that makes people nervous, and why the most commercially successful projects are usually the ones that were hardest to approve internally.

Your audience leaves with: a framework for evaluating creative risk, and language for defending bold work to stakeholders who want a guarantee.

•Decisions Under Constraint: Lessons from Building on Camera

Hosting a build show means making irreversible design decisions with a deadline, a budget, a crew, and a camera watching. No revision cycle, no second draft. This talk is about how creative judgment actually works when you can’t afford to deliberate — and why the constraints that seem to ruin the work usually improve it.

Your audience leaves with: practical methods for making fast creative decisions without defaulting to the obvious.

•What the Hand Still Knows: Creative Judgment in the Age of AI

After a decade of teaching design studio, I’ve watched what happens when a tool can generate a thousand options in a second. The bottleneck stopped being production and became taste — the ability to know which option is right and why. This talk examines what human judgment still does that no model does, drawn from the classroom and from practice.

Your audience leaves with: a clearer sense of where to invest human effort as generative tools absorb the production work.