Afleveringen
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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 solved neatly, but as something she's sitting with honestly;
How do you formalize a grassroots movement without killing its energy?How do you charge for something that was built on generosity? How do you make the case to institutions that fashion is a fundable art form when the legislation hasn't caught up with what everyone already knows to be true?Ashley doesn't pretend to have all the answers. But if anyone can address them, she can. She’s dynamic, driven and completely focused on getting things done to amplify and build the fashion industry in Ireland.
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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 with it. About the specific tension of representing someone else's community, someone else's grief, someone else's story — and what it takes to do that without ego getting in the way.
She speaks choosing using thread and embroidery, to depict women who are changing the course of Irish history.
We get into what it costs to hold political convictions publicly as a working artist — the online abuse that comes with feminist and anti-racism work, the decisions about which commissions to take and which to decline
Sarah is honest about all of it, including the moments where she's still figuring it out.
And then there's the structural question underneath everything — the one about who gets to be an artist at all. About the unpredictability, the spreadsheets, the eighty percent of your time that is admin and proposals and applications before you ever get to make anything. About the basic income for artists and whether it's enough, and about who gets quietly filtered out of the creative sector before they ever get started because the financial reality of it simply doesn't add up.
Sarah is open and genuinely uninterested in performing a version of her practice that makes it look easier than it is.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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 her groundbreaking research on migrant identities, she’s shown that belonging isn’t a given, it’s something we build, stitch into our institutions, and practice daily. Her work with GORM proves that meaningful change happens when leaders enable, equip, and elevate diverse voices, especially those often unheard.
And it’s not just about corporate diversity, it's about creating a future where every child feels seen, heard, and rooted.What small action can you take today to strengthen someone’s sense of belonging?
Worth thinking about. -
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 moment in this conversation where David describes presenting design directions to clients in words only — no visuals, just paragraphs — before a single pixel gets drawn. And it sounds so simple when he says it. But the thinking behind it, and the years of expensive mistakes that led him there, that's what the episode is really about.
We talk about the gap between what a client thinks they want and what they actually need. About the logos David preferred that the client didn't choose — and what he did with them anyway. About a landscape gardening project early in his career that went quietly sideways because he forgot to ask one question at the start. About whether working increasingly through screens and email changes the work itself, in ways that are hard to prove but impossible to ignore.
And then there's the bigger question underneath all of it — what does it mean to design something enduring? Not timeless in the abstract, but actually built to carry meaning for a decade or more, through every association a customer will ever have with a brand, starting from a first impression that might be completely wrong.
David is thoughtful, honest, and very good at saying things that sound simple until you sit with them for a minute. This is exactly the kind of conversation Rough Drafts was made for.
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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 updates at bouncecreative.ie and be the first to know who's coming up next.
