Outgoing Brett Gui Xin and Del Hardin Hoyle, they are a creative design team based in Brooklyn. In this chat we discuss their participation in some recent design fairs which gave them a chance to take a break and reflect back on a busy stretch of work. Their media are various: sculptural furniture, found materials, cloth. We got into their creative processes, the uniqueness of their collaborative practice, and their defiance against the dominant corporate culture in design. They emphasize the importance of maintaining creative independence, the emotional aspects of their work, and the joy found in creative exploration.

Good stories, great lessons.

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Visit Normals

In my book ‘It’s time to imagine harder’, my hypothesis was that bringing the creative consciousness back to work is a clear path to unlocking the unexpected and unanticipated. A way to sense into and feel for the unseen. The creative consciousness - which has a proclivity or impulse to operate comfortably even enthusiastically with the unknown — can dream of the undreamt as if were soaking in a warm bath of ambiguity.

The creative consciousness ambles around in the new territories and terrains for which the old ways of knowing and being do not fit — they are not big enough to make sense of the territory. They are The Old. The new is The New.

The creative consciousness is the thing that fosters the accidental discoveries, and that fosters unintended breakthroughs that challenge conventional boundaries. The creative consciousness is a catalyst for organic evolution within any effort for which uncertainty looms large.

When we embrace uncertainty, we open that new terrain, providing avenues for originality that rigid ideation frameworks often obscure.

This episode of the podcast gets into the sometimes painful but always fascinating struggle by which we try to maintain the creative spirit in an increasingly optimized world.

When the denizens of efficiency and productivity are the ones who set the rules, it can feel like a losing battle to keep the spark of innovation alive. But what if we flipped the script? What if we embraced the chaos, the messiness, and the unexpected as essential ingredients for creativity?

In this episode, I chat with the guys at ‘Normals,’ a creative studio that thrives on the unexpected, the illogical, and the beautifully tangentially inflected. They argue that true innovation isn’t about relentlessly pursuing efficiency, but about deliberately disrupting it – a vital conversation for anyone wrestling with the pressures of modern work.

This episode is a vital discussion for anyone who believes that the creative spirit is worth preserving, even in the face of relentless optimization. It’s a call to arms for those who feel that the relentless march of efficiency is stifling their creativity and and ultimately that thing we loosely call ‘innovation’ — the space where sense can be made out of chaos and confusion.

So have a listen as we have a coffee and chat. Come along and see how ‘Normals’ cultivates a creative environment built on embracing ambiguity, challenging assumptions, and ultimately, celebrating the power of human imagination to create something truly new.

I hope this episode serves as a reminder that sometimes the best solutions are found not in perfectly polished plans, but in delightfully messy explorations.

Very much like the editing of this podcast.

Oh, one last thing to say: this podcast, the newsletter, everything that goes on here is not free. It takes time and costs money.

If the podcast and the community have value to you, please consider supporting it.

There are three ways you can do that: first, is to become a professional tier supporter on Patreon. That’s easy. Just go over to Patreon and become a supporter.

The second way is to buy the books and zines over at the shop.

The third way is to hire me to work with you, your team or your organization. There are a multitude of shapes that can take, from workshops to commissioned projects to engaging me as a consultant.

You can find more about that over on the website in the services section or simply book a call with me.

The Intersection of Imagination, Science Fiction, Strategy and Creativity.

we wandered into something I keep circling back to: the idea that strategy is a kind of science fiction. Not in the “space battles and robots” sense, but in the deeper way that science fiction gives us permission to imagine futures—plausible or not—and then build toward them. Jarrett and I talked about design not just as a tool for solving problems, but as a mode of inquiry, a way of asking better questions and shaping new cultural narratives.

We both share this instinct that branding, design, and strategy aren’t just reactive—they’re speculative. They make bets on the kind of world a product or company wants to inhabit. They tell stories about futures that don’t exist yet, and then use those stories as scaffolding for action. That’s what excites me about this work: it's not just about “making things,” it's about materializing possibilities.

There's also this important undercurrent about imagination as a form of intelligence. We don’t talk enough about that. Creativity isn’t some whimsical add-on—it’s central to how organizations find direction, how they differentiate, how they respond to change. And good strategy? It needs to evoke, not just calculate.

This episode was a reminder that strategy and design, at their best, operate in the realm of the imaginary. They’re speculative tools. And maybe the real work is helping people see that imagination is infrastructure.

Jarrett Fuller is a designer, writer, educator, editor, and podcaster. He is an assistant professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University and hosts the design podcast Scratching the Surface.

https://jarrettfuller.com/

http://scratchingthesurface.fm/