Dear James,

I want to start by simply saying thank you! Sessions like yours are rare. Not because the ideas were clever… but because you actually gave us something to carry out of the room. And I don’t take that lightly. (See what I did there? XD)

As a matter of fact… one line has stayed with me since: “Creativity as a force of change,” not a thing conjured from nothing.

It undid a quiet insecurity I’ve carried as a designer. I’d always treated ideas like weather: they arrived or they didn’t. And when they didn’t, I assumed the fault was mine. So thank you, genuinely, for taking that pressure off. It gave a language to a process I was already living but never let myself call “creativity”.

What I appreciated most, though, was that you didn’t hand us a comfortable philosophy and leave it there. “The existential over the commercial” is a generous thing for an agency to say about itself, and instead of letting it sit as a slogan, you let us sit with the tension in it too. Reality check: that a studio built on that belief is still paid to change how people behave!

I kept thinking back to the Lucky Strike case you’d written about. Women invited to “sip on emancipation” through a campaign engineered entirely by men, “freedom” sold as a feeling, while the actual structures stayed exactly where they were! It’s the clearest proof I know that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it manufactures the sense of change, the notion of liberation. Which made your honesty about the tension in your own studio’s philosophy land even harder. You’d already convinced us how convincing that sleight of hand can be.

I also keep thinking about the idea that a first sketch has no brief, no sense of legacy, no predeterminism. That it’s only interpretation in one instant. There’s something generous in being handed permission to think that freely, even briefly, before the client or the professor comes back into the room. I’m grateful your session gave us that instant, even if just for an hour.

Mostly, I left thinking less about “great ideas” and more about the discipline underneath them, the willingness to keep questioning something you already believe. That’s not a small thing to teach a room full of design students, and I don’t think I would have arrived at it on my own.

Thank you again, James. For your time, your honesty and for trusting us with a philosophy you clearly still question yourself.

My stupid brain’s not so stupid anymore!

With sincere thanks, Anjali