Inspiration rarely arrives where everyone else is looking for it.
A few months ago, I wrote about finding creative fuel beyond the usual capitals of culture—Beirut instead of Paris, Venice instead of Milan, Athens and Antwerp instead of the same four cities every brand deck references by default. This past week reaffirmed that belief, and it did so in a vineyard in the Côte du Rhône, of all places.
Four days there with an extraordinary group of artists, designers, and thinkers pulled in from London, Milan, Copenhagen, Beirut, Venice, and New York. The conversations moved without friction—from artistic process to hospitality design, from sourcing master artisans in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Mexico, and Italy, to watching Danish designers reinterpret mid-century furniture as contemporary social commentary rather than nostalgia.
What struck me most wasn’t the range of disciplines in the room. It was the range of perspectives.
Everyone was asking different questions. Everyone was looking through a different lens at the same set of problems. That’s where the actual value lived—not in the sum of expertise, but in the friction between viewpoints.
Connection, Not Creation
The longer I work in branding, the more convinced I become that our job isn’t simply to create. It’s to connect ideas that don’t appear related to each other—before anyone else notices they are.
Great brands aren’t assembled from mood boards and reference decks alone. They’re built from curiosity. From stepping outside your familiar circles on purpose. From borrowing thinking—not aesthetics—from other cultures, crafts, and disciplines. From staying a student of the world, no matter how many years of experience sit behind you.
It’s easy, in this industry, to mistake a well-curated reference library for original thought. But references only tell you what’s already been made. Curiosity is what lets you see the connective tissue nobody’s mapped yet—the thing that turns a mood board into a genuinely new idea.
The Same Pursuit, Different Rooms
Tomorrow I start another chapter: MIT’s certificate program in Agentic AI.
To some, an artist retreat in rural France and a program on autonomous AI systems might look like two entirely separate worlds. To me, they’re the same pursuit wearing different clothes.
Understanding what comes next—for brands, for culture, for the work itself—requires equal parts human curiosity and technological fluency. One without the other gets you either something soulless and efficient, or something beautiful and irrelevant. Neither is the future.
The future won’t belong to those who feel forced to choose between art and AI. It will belong to the people and the brands that know how to connect them—who can sit in a vineyard talking about Danish furniture on Monday and sit in a classroom talking about autonomous systems on Tuesday, and see them as the same conversation.
That’s the work now. Not choosing a lane. Building the bridge.