Jack Lovel is a Melbourne-based architectural photographer who has spent the better part of a decade chasing light through modernist houses, and making some arresting images in Australian architecture photography. In this episode, we trace the full arc – from a first trip to Europe with a borrowed camera, to growing up in an Ivanoff-designed house in Perth, to somehow ending up in the Hamptons in the summer, photographing mid-century houses on Long Island.

Jack talks about the personal project that changed everything: his decade-long documentation of the work of West Australian architect Ivan Ivanoff, which started as a modest exhibition in Perth and snowballed into a book, a Melbourne exhibition, and shows at the London Festival of Architecture, and Modernism Week in Palm Springs. Something Jack doesn’t shy away from talking about is always searching for that balance between commercial work and personal projects – and why doing the soul-feeding, non-paying stuff is what usually opens the door to exciting new projects.

We also talk about patience as a skill, the fine line between loosening up and losing the plot, and why Jack will never let his work be mistaken for AI slop.

Check out Jack’s work at jacklovel.com, and follow him on Instagram at @jack.lovel.

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“Innovation” is one of those words that gets overused so much it’s starting feel devoid of meaning.

Richard Walzer isn’t interested in new for the sake of it. As Design Director of Breakthrough Innovation at PepsiCo (Europe), he works in the uncomfortable space most businesses avoid – the unknown unknowns. The problems no one has defined yet, let alone solved.

In this episode, Richard pulls apart what real innovation actually looks like when there’s money, scale and risk on the line. And we hate to break it to all the light bulb moment die-hards out there, but true innovation (at least for Richard) is not about eureka moments or big creative swings. It’s rigour, it’s watching what people actually do, not what they say. It’s spending most of your time making sure you’re solving the right problem, before you even think about the solution. One of the biggest creative lessons to glean from this episode is that most teams aren’t failing at execution, they’re just designing the wrong thing.

We also get into the discipline behind design thinking, the myth of differentiation, and why “distinctive” is the only thing worth chasing. From sacrificial prototypes to future consumers, Richard maps out how ideas move from vague hypothesis to something that can survive the real world.

This is creativity with true commerciality at its core.

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What if a home was composed like a work of art?

In this ep of Creative or Dead, we speak with interior designer Susannah Holmberg, founder of Susannah Holmberg Studios (www.susannahholmberg.com) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Susannah approaches interior as immersive installations – spaces where art, architecture and materials intersect.

We talk about her unconventional path into design, the idea that beauty might actually be a form of function, and how her studio develops personal interiors by drawing on unexpected references – from favourite films and books to travel and landscape.

The conversation also explores creative process: why blocking time for deep work matters, how tension between contrasting elements can spark originality, and why handmade pieces and craftsmanship remain central to her projects.

And, in our usual Creative or Dead fashion, we finish with our final question: if you could design your own death, what would it look like? Susannah’s cinematic vision involves black veils, oversized florals and a rainy green landscape.

Hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine, this is a conversation about creativity, craft and designing spaces that feel like living works of art.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.