Rough Drafts from BOUNCE

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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. It’s not confessional, and it’s not about failure. It’s about what creative practice actually looks like when you’re inside it: ambiguous, iterative, collaborative, and often uncertain until very late. We talk to graphic designers and typographers, architects and urban thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and game designers. To social innovators using design as a tool for change, educators building the next generation of creative thinkers, researchers asking the uncomfortable questions about what design is actually for. To the craftspeople and the coders, the brand strategists and the community artists, the independent studios and the solo practitioners working out of a room at the end of the garden. Some guests are well known. Some are doing the most interesting work you've never heard of. What they have in common is a willingness to talk about the version before the version — to show you the sketch before the sketch, the draft before the draft, the conversation that happened before anyone knew what they were making. Rough Drafts is made in Ireland, with guests from across Europe and beyond — because the best process conversations don't care about geography. Irish design has a distinctive voice, a particular relationship to craft, language, and identity, and a community of practitioners who are doing genuinely original work on a global stage. Rough Drafts is a place to hear how that work actually gets made. 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. Every episode comes with, process images, and the materials guests brought to the conversation — the early sketches, the abandoned directions, the slides that didn't make it to the presentation. The stuff that usually ends up in the bin. That's the bit we're interested in. Rough Drafts is a podcast from BOUNCE — Ireland's independent platform for design thinking, process, and critical discourse.

Episodes

  1. Sarah Bracken Soper: It takes time to be an overnight success

    1d ago

    Sarah Bracken Soper: It takes time to be an overnight success

    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.

    1h 9m
  2. Dr. Mamobo Ogoro: Allyship is a Verb

    May 31

    Dr. Mamobo Ogoro: Allyship is a Verb

    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.

    45 min
  3. David Airey: Not Love at First Sight

    May 24

    David Airey: Not Love at First Sight

    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.

    1h 4m

  4. Season 1, Episode 1 Trailer

    Rough Drafts // Where Ideas Are Still Forming

    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.

    2 min

Trailer

About

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. It’s not confessional, and it’s not about failure. It’s about what creative practice actually looks like when you’re inside it: ambiguous, iterative, collaborative, and often uncertain until very late. We talk to graphic designers and typographers, architects and urban thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and game designers. To social innovators using design as a tool for change, educators building the next generation of creative thinkers, researchers asking the uncomfortable questions about what design is actually for. To the craftspeople and the coders, the brand strategists and the community artists, the independent studios and the solo practitioners working out of a room at the end of the garden. Some guests are well known. Some are doing the most interesting work you've never heard of. What they have in common is a willingness to talk about the version before the version — to show you the sketch before the sketch, the draft before the draft, the conversation that happened before anyone knew what they were making. Rough Drafts is made in Ireland, with guests from across Europe and beyond — because the best process conversations don't care about geography. Irish design has a distinctive voice, a particular relationship to craft, language, and identity, and a community of practitioners who are doing genuinely original work on a global stage. Rough Drafts is a place to hear how that work actually gets made. 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. Every episode comes with, process images, and the materials guests brought to the conversation — the early sketches, the abandoned directions, the slides that didn't make it to the presentation. The stuff that usually ends up in the bin. That's the bit we're interested in. Rough Drafts is a podcast from BOUNCE — Ireland's independent platform for design thinking, process, and critical discourse.

Information

  • Creator
    BOUNCE
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    4
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 BOUNCE