Latest / Rough Drafts - Exploring Creative Process - by BOUNCE / BOUNCE 2027 // Open Call
Transcript
- Danielle: Hi there, this is Danielle from Bounce. In this episode, it's just me talking to you, and I'm going to spend the next half hour or so walking through our 2027 theme, what it means, and what we're actually looking for from people who want to apply to speak. The open call is out right now, and you can apply to be part of the lineup. And it will take place on 15th of January 2027 in Trinity College Dublin. So this isn't a sales pitch. I'm not trying to convince anyone to apply. I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for you to figure out whether this is for you. And if it is, to submit something that actually reflects what you do. The Bounce Open Call is open to designers, makers, educators, researchers, creatives across the spectrum of design. anyone working in any creative discipline who has something real to say about the theme. You don't need to have spoken at a conference before, you don't need to have a polished proposal. You need a genuine angle on your work though. So the theme is friction. Let me tell you what we mean by that, where it came from, and why I think it matters right now. And then we'll go through each of the three strands so you can start to think about where your work might sit. So the theme itself, friction, why that word? So let's start with the obvious problem with choosing friction as a theme for a design event. Every designer in the room is going to arrive at a version of this phrase in their head. Remove the friction. It's in every UX brief, it's in the pitch decks, onboarding decks. The job of good design, we've been told over and over is to get out of the way, make it easy, make it fast, and whatever you do, make it seamless. And that's not wrong, by the way. There's an entire field of behavioural design built on this insight. Every extra step between intention and action is a moment at which people fall away. Add five minutes to a process, and you might lose two-thirds of your completions or audience. And that's no small thing. The MyGovID story is a really good example. Irish citizens used to have to authenticate separately for every government service. And then had a different login for the revenue, a different one for social welfare, and another for driver's licenses. Each disconnected system was a friction point that cost people time and for some access to things that they were actually entitled to. So the design solution was a single sign-on. One verified identity now used across all the services for over two million, three million people. And Ireland also committed to the EU's once-only principle. that asks you for the information only once and not repeatedly across apartments. So look that's really good design. That's friction removed in service of people's lives and bounces not arguing against that. But there's a kind of friction that nobody is trying to remove, the kind that Kirk Vonnegut was defending when he told his famous story about envelopes. in case you aren't aware of it, he needed envelopes to post a letter. And his wife said to him, You know, you're not a poor man. You could go online and buy hundreds of envelopes, keep them in your drawer. But he pretended not to hear her. And he said, When I go out, I have an experience. I go out to get the envelopes because I have a really good time in the process of buying that one envelope. I meet people, I see some great looking babies. I see a fire engine going by and I give it a thumbs up and I ask a woman, Well, what kind of dog is that? So the moral of the story is, in his words, is we're on this earth to fart around. And of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realise or don't care is that we're dancing animals. So I think that's a really apt quote. The dancing animals, the things The efficiency logic misses. You can't optimize your way to a fire engine going past. You can't prompt a kind of dog conversation with its owner. The detour is the life, and Bounce is interested in designers who still take the detour. There's a difference between friction that excludes and friction that demands. And Bounce is interested in the second kind. But here's the thing: the logic of frictionless. Has spread way beyond forms and checkout flows. It's now the operating logic of creative culture, of design practice itself. And I think that's where it starts to break something. Luna Moore, Dutch designer and artist, co-founder of Studio Moniker, and she also wrote Design Friction Manifesto, and she ended Bounce 2026, puts it like this: Digital technology has one overriding goal: eliminate friction. Make everything seamless, make everything predictable. And she argues, and I find this genuinely unsettling, that predictability isn't neutral. If our behavior is predictable, a small number of people can control it. Friction is what keeps people unpredictable. Friction is where your autonomy lives. So that's her argument for why friction matters in digital culture. My argument for bounce. Is adjacent but different. I'm less interested in big tech and more interested in what happens to design practice when the logic of optimization becomes the only logic we know. Look, we all got into design to solve problems, real messy problems, the kind where the difficulty is the information, where staying in the difficulties is the only way to understand what's going on. And I think a lot of mid-career designers are slowly, quietly losing their tolerance for that kind of difficulty, not because they're lazy, but because the tools and the culture and the briefs are pushing them towards speed and output and away from thinking. There's a concept from cognitive psychology that I keep coming back to, desirable difficulty. The idea developed by Robert Bjork in UCLA is that when learning is too easy, the brain processes it passively. But the right kind of struggle forces deeper encoding, stronger retention, better transfer to new situations. The difficulty is the learning. You can't outsource it and keep the result. That's true for design too. The hard project that nearly broke you. Is usually the one that changed how you work. The brief you couldn't crack is usually the one that produced something you're still proud of today. Bounce 2027 is a call to designers who know that, who have earned their shortcuts and are choosing deliberately not to take them. So within this theme, I've developed three strands, and I'm going to go through those two, and they're completely open to interpretation. The first strand is friction as method, process, resistance, and the slow work. So what I'm asking here is: what are you willing to do the long way? This is the most literal strand, I suppose, the one about process. about the physical analogue slow, hands in it, quality of the making. On our website, we say that craft doesn't separate process from results because the process is the result. The twists and turns, the mistakes and tangents become the work. I want to be clear about what we mean by that, because it's easy to hear craft and imagine printmaking letterpress. That's not what we're talking about. I'm talking about the deliberate choices to go the long way around, to stay in the difficulty. To not immediately reach for the shortcut. There's a useful framework that I've come across. It describes a type of design friction as resistance. The idea that overcoming a challenge can be immensely satisfying and the difficulty and the reward are inseparable. You can't get the reward without the difficulty. They're not separate things you can unbundle. So this strand is for you if your practice involves any of the following. A process that most people would have automated, but you've chosen to keep doing by hand. And something specific came from that choice. A project built entirely around constraint, restraint, or where the limitation was the creative engine. A way of working that is slower than it needs to be, and you've figured out why that slowness matters. Maybe it's a personal project you kept going back to that you didn't have a client or a deadline for, and what it taught you that your paid work couldn't. Craft in any medium, including digital, where the debt of practice produced something you couldn't have got to quickly. I want to tell you a story to make this a little more concrete. Luis Mendo is a Spanish illustrator based in Japan. He spent twenty years as an art director in Amsterdam, running teams, managing inboxes, l living for meetings. But then his father died and he stopped. He went to Japan and he just started drawing by hand every day with no agenda. He talked about this on a podcast I recently listened to, and he talks about how we are getting used to this frictionless life, which is actually too cold and it doesn't give you anything new. He talks about it being too cold, not inefficient, not slow, but cold. There's something about seamlessness that's effectless. It produces, but it doesn't feel. And if your work has started to feel cold to you, this strand might be for you. He also talks about the Japanese concept of shokunin, the artisan. The shokunen ethic is that if you're going to do a thing, you do it properly all the way. No shortcuts. He describes watching a Tokyo bookshop employee gift wrap a purchase and asking them to hurry up. The employee stopped, looked at him, and said, Do you want me to gift wrap or not? They didn't understand the concept of making it quick. If you want it, you'd do it right. That's Vonnegut's envelope errand in a Japanese craft context. Both are saying the same thing from opposite sides of the world. The process of getting there is not a cost to be eliminated, it's the whole point. Your talk doesn't have to be about Japan or letterpress or hand drawn illustrations. It just has to be honest about a practice where the method was the point and what came from that. The second strand is friction as a signal and what difficulty teaches. Ask yourself, what are you learning from the thing that isn't working? This strand is a bit different. It's less about deliberate choice and more about what happens when something resists you. When the project doesn't go where you expect it, when the client pushes back in a way that reveals something, when the system fails, when you fail. The bounce team says discomfort is information. The constraint that frustrates you is also the constraint that reveals you. The friction between what you intended and what emerged is often where the most interesting work lives. And it's impossible to prompt into existence. That last bit really matters. Impossible to prompt into existence. You can't ask an AI to give you the insight that came from something not working. That only comes from you. being in the thing with the mess long enough to understand what the mess is telling you. There's a really useful distinction in behavioral science and behavioural design between what they call sludge and friction that works against you, that blocks access, that excludes, and good friction, which creates a space for reflection, slow down automatic choices, and serves the person experiencing it. Behavioral design describes good friction as friction that includes deliberation, time into a process. That might otherwise be driven by automatic processing. Basically, the cooling off period, the confirmation dialogue, the pause before the irreversible decision. Design research uses a similar idea. The speed bump. It doesn't stop traffic, it slows it down enough to prompt a moment of thought. Am I going at the right speed for this environment? Friction as signal is interested in that. The moment where something slowed you down and you actually looked at what was happening. the rough draft that showed you what the finished piece needed to be, the failure that was more generative than the success. A project where something went wrong and what emerged from the wrongness was better than the original. A client or collaborator relationship with real friction in it and what the friction was teaching you both. cross cultural and cross disciplinary work where you were genuinely disoriented and what came from not knowing. Speculative or critical work that deliberately resists easy resolution and why you think that resistance was right, the rough draft, the failed version, the abandoned direction and what it contained that the final work didn't. Let's think about interruption, a deliberate break in a familiar pattern that forces a shift from intuitive automatic thinking to conscious considered action, and friction where withholding clarity sparks curiosity and discussion. What is left to the imagination invites participation. Let's think about what happens when things break down, friction as destruction, when something degrades, glitches, fails. We stop seeing through it and start seeing it. The medium becomes the message. The crack in the screen reveals the design. If any of this lands, if you're thinking of a specific project, a specific moment of difficulty, a specific thing you learned from something that didn't work, this might be your strand. And the final strand, strand three, fiction as presence, trust and self. You might ask yourself, what does it mean to make something that could only come from you? This is the strand I find most urgent right now, and probably the hardest to talk about clearly, because it gets into territory that sounds abstract until it really kind of lands or resonates with someone. So if we think as non-human intelligence floods the creative zones and outputs, and it's flooding creativity and creative channels fast, presence becomes the rarest currency. Not speed, but presence, the unmistakable trace of a particular mind, body, and life moving through a particular medium. This strand is about authorship in its deepest sense, not ownership. But origin, work that carries the maker. There's a line from the writer Anu Atlura that I've come back to time and time again. As intelligence gets cheaper, presence gets more expensive, real earned interpersonal trust will become the rarest currency. When tech is everywhere, people are the new edge. That's an argument about economics and it's also an argument about design. The thing that has your fingerprints on it, literally and figuratively, is going to be worth more, not less. And everything else gets generated faster. In Luna Moore's performance, emoticons don't have wrinkles. She gets all of this perfectly. The title says it all. The emoji doesn't have wrinkles because it hasn't lived anything. The smooth face has no history. Friction is what makes something have its character, its specificity, its proof of origin. If we think about the deliberate admission of imperfection, warmth, or incompleteness that makes something approachable and human, the research consists consistently shows that perceived competence and warmth are inversely related. The person who projects absolute polish is often trusted less than the person who lets you see the work and the process. There's also something important here about the difference between voice and style. The bounce theme specifically says voice and signature and the development of distinctive practice, not distinctive style. Style is the surface, voice is the thinking. The practice is what produces both over time, consistently, even as the surface changes. Within this strand, you might think about work that is unmistakably yours, not just because of the visual style, But because of the way of thinking or asking questions that runs through everything you make. A decision to build or maintain your own independent practice and what that independent has cost and given you. Work that exists in relationships to where you're from, who you are, or the specific life you've lived and how that shows up in the making. A relationship with a community, a place, a material, a collaborator that has shaped your practice in ways that couldn't be replicated. Work made in or alongside the age of generative tools and an honest account of what you're trying to protect and develop in that context. This strand is probably the broadest in terms of what it can kind of hold. Someone building a membership community and reflecting on what independence actually requires, someone making work rooted in cultural heritage or their location that couldn't come from anywhere else. Someone that has been using AI. And is trying to articulate where the line is for them in their practice, not in theory. What this is not is a general talk about AI and creativity. We've sat through those already. This strand is looking for people who have a specific honest personal account of what present means in their work. A question to ask yourself. If someone looked at ten years of your work without knowing who made it, what would they know about you? And is that what you want them to know? Okay, so there are the three strands. and so some of the kind of more practical bits of the open call itself. So, what are we actually looking for? So to apply, you need three things really. You need a talk title and an abstract. So tell us what you'll talk about. Not what friction is in general. We don't need you to explain the theme back to us, but tell us what you specifically have to say from your specific practice. Try keep it under 250 words. And the proposals that land well are the ones that we can kind of picture what the talk is about. You need to show us some work. So links to portfolios, websites, Instagram, PDFs, whatever shows us what you make. We're not looking for awards or press articles. We're looking for an understanding of your practice really. And a short bio. We want to know who you are, what you're interested in, where you're based. Just a few lines is all it takes. Here are some things that people worry about, but we really don't want you to worry about at all. Maybe you haven't spoken at a conference before. That's great for us, really. We actively want people who haven't. The open call is not a way of finding someone to give a talk that they've given ten times already. We actively want to find new voices and give them a platform. So we'll help you, we'll get you on stage, we'll do some coaching with you to help with your presentation. So don't worry about that. The next thing that some people worry about is that the work isn't award winning or you know, you haven't a large social media following. We don't care about these either. We're interested in what you've learned and what you have to say, not in how you your work has been perceived Another thing you might be worried about is that your work doesn't fit into one strand. That's fine. If it sits between two, or if it doesn't quite fit any of them, but that you think it belongs to the theme, submit it. Tell us how you're thinking about it. We'd rather get a proposal that doesn't fit neatly than miss something really interesting. You might be based outside of Dublin or outside of Ireland, and that's fine too. Bounce is an Irish platform, yes, but it's not geographically closed. We've had speakers from Ireland and from across Europe. So if your work is relevant to the team and relevant to our audience of mid-career designers, up to senior and creative directors, we want to hear from you. One thing I want to name explicitly. Like bounce is genuinely for those mid career designers and beyond. That doesn't mean a specific number of years. It means you've passed the beginning bit. You're not necessarily in college. You've developed a practice, you have a perspective on it. You've made enough things and have learned something. And you're at the point where you can reflect on that learning without it being everything I found out in the first year or A lifetime retrospective. The theme friction is specifically asking what happens when you've earned your shortcuts and you choose not to take them. You need to have the shortcut available to make the choice meaningful. So a few final things before I go, just to address that bounce is not an argument against clarity or accessibility or care for the people who use what we make. Removing friction from a form, a wayfinding system, a public service that's often an act of equity. That work matters enormously. And the GovID story I told at the start is a design success story in that context. There's a difference between friction that excludes and friction that demands. And Bounce is interested in the second kind, the difficulty that asks something of the maker and gives something back. if you work in inclusive design, accessibility, public services, or any field where removing friction is the primary goal, you may not be the target of the theme, but you may have some interesting things to say about it. The distinction between friction that excludes and friction that makes might be something you think about all the time in a way that the rest of us don't. So do apply. A short note for the workshop call, there's also a separate open call for workshop facilitators. The workshop facilitators don't have to follow the theme, so check out the show notes for the link if you are better suited to a hands-on participatory session than a talk. That's an option for you. And for those who subscribe to our Patreon, you get first access to the open call application. Everything that Bounce makes it lives over on Patreon and it's free to join. Over there you'll get full recordings of past talks and panel discussions from the Bounce Festival, episodes of Rough Drafts, this podcast, with contemporary practitioners, doers and thinkers, behind the scenes documentation from the Bounce Challenge, and it's the closest thing we have to an archive of how Irish Design thinks told by the people doing the work. You can join free at patreon.com forward slash bouncecreative. You don't need a card, you just need a free account, and you're in. If you want to go further, and we'd love if you did, a paid membership helps us continue to stay independent. We've got two passes available. The Studio Pass is a fiver a month. You get access to selected Bounce content. Priority access to ticket drops, 10% discounts on our annual event tickets, and free entry to the Bounce Challenge. If you love us and love what we're doing, then you can go to the practice circle, which is 10 euro a month, which gives you full access to our recordings, everything from the studio pass, 10% off workshop tickets, 25% of our annual event of all the tickets that you buy, and free entry to our bounce challenge. It really does help support the work that we're doing. So you can check that all out on patreon.com forward slash bouncecreative. Don't forget you can join for free, so don't hesitate. For those who join our community over on Patreon, you get to enter the open call before everyone else. Okay, that's probably enough for me. If you've listened this far, you probably know by now whether you have something to say. And if you're still not sure, submit it anyway. The proposal process is the work. It might help you figure out what you think. links to the open call are in the show notes. Don't forget subscribing to Patreon gives you early access to the open call.