An unorthodox blend of disciplines and undisciplines. This is how we used to talk about Rosie Lee. In all honesty, we don’t fully know what it means but I think that's why we love it so much.
unorthodoxblend.substack.com (https://unorthodoxblend.substack.com/s/conversations?utm_medium=podcast)
Stijn Druyts (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijn-druyts-b3941033/) is a Belgian brand leader, graphic designer and educator whose career has taken him from running an agency in Antwerp to spending 17 years in China, working with brands including Converse and Timberland. Now based in Brussels, he teaches brand design at AP Hogeschool, helping the next generation find their feet and develop their own point of view. We first met through Converse around a decade ago and have stayed connected, most recently through our annual lectures for his students.
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Moving from the brand industry in China to teaching in Belgium brought a considerable change of pace. Stijn describes it as stepping off a high-speed train and onto a train that stops at every station. That experience opens up a conversation about speed in creative work: the pressure to keep up, the possibilities technology creates, and the pleasure of doing something slowly, with your hands. For students preparing to enter the industry, there is a difficult balance between developing their ideas and learning to work within commercial deadlines.
We talk about taste and what it takes to develop it. When everyone can access the same references and generate ideas in seconds, how do you find something that feels like your own? Stijn recalls discovering music through basement shows, small ads and sending cash overseas for records that might take months to arrive. The effort became part of the experience. We also consider what gives us hope for younger creatives. They are entering an uncertain industry, but they have tools and perspectives that could help them change it.
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The question of effort stayed with us. We spend a lot of our working lives making things easier, faster and more accessible, and there are good reasons for doing so. But some of the things we value most carry a memory of the work involved: finding them, making them, fixing them or learning to appreciate them. Convenience can remove something we later realise mattered.
There is a responsibility here for our industry, too. As experienced teams become more capable with AI, the commercial argument for bringing in junior creatives gets harder. We still need to create opportunities for people to learn, contribute and eventually take the work somewhere we would never have thought to go.
Stijn’s relationship with his students offers a hopeful place to finish. He is helping them develop their identities while remaining open to what they can teach him. We have experience to share, but we also have plenty to learn.
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7 Oct 2026
UBC063 Marcia Caines
arcia Caines (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcycaines/) works in PR and communications across design, architecture and innovation. English and based in Turin, her career has taken her through textiles, publishing and consumer technology. She is the founder of Rot Comm (https://rotcomm.com/), bringing that experience to brand communication and reputation management.
We first met Marcia during her time as Head of Brand at Punkt (https://www.punkt.ch/?srsltid=AU7gw4XNwA_fnyicYnaRSjfCNvnuVlq0hzXNwIIp4GtAUD53ya_KpdVV)., the Swiss technology company known for its pared-back mobile phones designed by Jasper Morrison (https://jaspermorrison.com/). It was work that prompted plenty of conversations about our relationship with technology. Catching up again, we found those important questions hadn’t gone away.
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Marcia talked her shift to being self-employed about the satisfaction of putting her energy into something she feels responsible for, alongside the less enjoyable business of getting paid and understanding tax.
From there, we move into the everyday encounters with other people that are disappearing as more of life happens through a screen. We talk about shared spaces, community and whether social confidence needs practice just as much as any other skill. Education comes into it too. How do we prepare people to handle unfamiliar situations, rather than simply learn the right answers?
AI gives those questions another dimension. Experience can help us use it well, but where will the next generation gain that experience if the work they would have learnt through is automated?
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It was lovely to reconnect with Marcia and pick up a conversation that has been running, in different forms, since our work together at Punkt. She asks direct questions and gives us room to think, but also pushes when an answer feels incomplete. Being able to work faster is useful - whether that actually makes the work better takes becomes a much more complex consideration.
What stayed with us was the tension between adapting and choosing. We use new tools, we see their value and we also care about the learning, relationships and character that can get lost along the way. Marcia’s perspective kept bringing the discussion back to what those changes mean in the real world - something we should all be challenging ourselves with more often.
https://rotcomm.com/ (https://rotcomm.com/)
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23 Sept 2026
UBC062 Andrew Missingham
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