Rough Drafts from BOUNCE

Irish Design Week is nearly here, and this year’s programme is one of the strongest yet. In this episode, Danielle walks through some of the standout events across the country — from craft workshops to policy summits — before sitting down with Susannah Montgomery, Business Development and Ecosystem Manager at EIT Culture & Creativity, to talk about the biggest event in the calendar. The Europe...

In this episode we talk about the parish priest giving permission for Una to go to art college, designing Valentine's cards that backfired because all the boys thought Una had sent them, the second-hand Mac bought from a buy and sell magazine and QuarkXPress learned from a book in a week. This episode is thirty years in the making. What this conversation explores is what sustains a practice across...

Niamh McArdle is a designer from Galway, based in Dublin, and sometimes Florence. She works freelance to allow her the freedom that travels brings, but at the heart of her work is a distinctly contemporary Irish design aesthetic.  In this episode she speaks about her interests that have enriched her design, from film, literature, writing and her family's habit of collecting and curating objects of...

In today’s episode. I speak with Sarah Moloney, graphic designer and illustrator based in Dublin. This is a conversation about what sustains a practice over a long time, and the answer turns out to be emotion and the pursuit of a genuine felt response in whoever encounters the work. Sarah Moloney describes it plainly: she wants people to feel a connection. Everything else in her practice follows f...

This years theme is FRICTION. Exploring what it means to resist, slow down, and make things that could only come from you. In the fast-paced world of design, the common mantra is to "remove friction" to create seamless experiences. But what if friction is not just a barrier but a necessary part of our creative and personal journeys? Check out this episode where I delve into the theme of friction a...

Hazel Coonagh is an Irish photographer and visual artist who starts with a portrait taken in the ordinary way, and then takes it somewhere else entirely. Through digital manipulation, hand embroidery stitched through paper and canvas, and a visual sensibility drawn from Japanese art, surrealism, and Art Nouveau, her work creates images that feel both completely new and deeply familiar. There's a n...

Today's guest is Naoise Ó Conchubhair, someone whose entire career has been shaped by an obsession with type, the Irish language and the conviction that the best design always comes from understanding your context before you touch a single letterform. We go way back to Naoise’s childhood, a furniture designer father, a grandfather who founded an Irish language publication, and a mother who was inv...

There are very few experiences in contemporary design/art that make you forget where you are. In this episode I speak with Pauric Freeman, whose performances are one of them. He performs live audio-visual shows in venues where the audience watches someone make the work in real time. In the episode we explore his process and its slowness as a value, not a problem. He returns to this repeatedly and...

In this episode I speak to Ashley Shak-Penn who has spent a decade building things around the globe, from the United Nations to Dublin’s Startup scene, and now as Managing Director of Dublin Independent Fashion Week (DIFW). We talk about her varied background, where the contexts change, but the problems are the same. That tension is what this conversation keeps returning to, not as a problem to be...

Sarah Bracken Soper has been making art for twenty years. She only became a full-time artist two years ago. That gap, doing every job that kept the lights on while the practice quietly grew alongside it, is one of the most honest things discussed in this conversation. We talk about what "Artivism" actually means when you're living it.  About making work that doesn't just sit on a wall but argues w...

Ever wonder what really drives intercultural leadership? Check out this episode if you believe belonging is stronger when we actively do the work to include and uplift others. Most people think belonging is just a feeling, something we instinctively recognise. But Dr. Mamobo Ogoro reminds us: belonging is designed , shaped by intentional actions. From her childhood experiences of being othered to...

David Airey has been making logos for twenty years and writing about them for seventeen. His third edition of Logo Design Love just came out, and rather than sit down and talk about what's in it, we ended up talking about what changed — in the book, in his practice, and in how he thinks about what he's actually doing when he hands a client a mark that's supposed to outlast them both. There's a mom...

Rough Drafts – Where ideas are still forming. Most design podcasts focus on finished work: the award, the commission, the retrospective. Rough Drafts goes earlier. Each episode explores the thinking before the thinking, the first sketch, the direction that didn’t work, the moment a project changed shape. New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts — or sign up for update...