Creative or Dead

Volker Haug's story starts with a spark (quite literally)! As a kid, he was so captivated by light that he'd made his first light fitting by the age of ten, and somewhere along the way managed to accidentally electrocute himself. This early obsession never really left him, even as he built a first career behind the chair as a hairdresser. In this episode, we trace his journey from the salon to founding one of Australia's most distinctive lighting studios. And along the way he shares the calling that pulled Volker toward lighting design, the mentors who shaped how he thinks, and the very humble beginnings of his business: a garage converted into a workshop that grew, organically, into the studio it is today.

From there the conversation opens right up. Volker gets into why collaboration makes both design and business healthier, how travel keeps his creativity alive, and the role our senses play in memory and making – plus the strange overstimulation of modern life and how he finds calm inside it. He's a firm believer that creativity is a universal human trait, that desperate situations often spark the best of it, and that his years in hairdressing taught him more about people than any design course could.

Find Volker's work at volkerhaug.com and follow the studio on Instagram at @volkerhaug

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Creative or Dead is hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine. Aleesha is the founder of About Futures, an independent publication on the future of sustainable design. David is a creative business builder and leader with more than two decades across branding, strategy and social impact, and sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Ellison is a Byron Bay–based creative director whose winding, capital-C creative career has taken in fashion, interior styling, magazine editorial and a furniture brand that found success on both sides of the Pacific. In this episode, we trace the full arc – from a fashion label sold at Bondi Markets, to years assisting stylists and schlepping props across Sydney in a little Suzuki Swift, to seven years as a style editor at Real Living, to launching her own eponymous furniture brand and, most recently, stepping away from it to build a slower, more sustainable studio of her own.

Sarah is refreshingly open about creative burnout – the desk-bound years running a growing brand, the day she felt she'd run out of ideas, and how a few weeks off and a pottery wheel helped her bring her back. We also get into her sensory approach to design, the alchemy of past and present, working with local bio-materials, her ever-shifting take on what AI means for creatives, and the dream of a boutique hotel done top to bottom.

Find Sarah's work at sarahellisoncreative.com and follow her on Instagram at @sarahellisoncreative

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Creative or Dead is hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine. Aleesha is the founder of About Futures, an independent publication on the future of sustainable design. David is a creative business builder and leader with more than two decades across branding, strategy and social impact, and sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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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Creative or Dead is hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine. Aleesha is the founder of About Futures, an independent publication on the future of sustainable design. David is a creative business builder and leader with more than two decades across branding, strategy and social impact, and sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“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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Creative or Dead is hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine. Aleesha is the founder of About Futures, an independent publication on the future of sustainable design. David is a creative business builder and leader with more than two decades across branding, strategy and social impact, and sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

This is a conversation about creativity, craft and designing spaces that feel like living works of art.

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Creative or Dead is hosted by Aleesha Callahan and David Constantine. Aleesha is the founder of About Futures, an independent publication on the future of sustainable design. David is a creative business builder and leader with more than two decades across branding, strategy and social impact, and sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.