Rough Drafts – Where ideas are still forming.
Most design podcasts focus on finished work: the award, the commission, the retrospective. Rough Drafts goes earlier. Each episode explores the thinking before the thinking, the first sketch, the direction that didn’t work, the moment a project changed shape.
It’s not confessional, and it’s not about failure. It’s about what creative practice actually looks like when you’re inside it: ambiguous, iterative, collaborative, and often uncertain until very late.
We talk to graphic designers and typographers, architects and urban thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, animators and game designers. To social innovators using design as a tool for change, educators building the next generation of creative thinkers, researchers asking the uncomfortable questions about what design is actually for. To the craftspeople and the coders, the brand strategists and the community artists, the independent studios and the solo practitioners working out of a room at the end of the garden.
Some guests are well known. Some are doing the most interesting work you've never heard of. What they have in common is a willingness to talk about the version before the version — to show you the sketch before the sketch, the draft before the draft, the conversation that happened before anyone knew what they were making.
Rough Drafts is made in Ireland, with guests from across Europe and beyond — because the best process conversations don't care about geography. Irish design has a distinctive voice, a particular relationship to craft, language, and identity, and a community of practitioners who are doing genuinely original work on a global stage. Rough Drafts is a place to hear how that work actually gets made.
New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts — or sign up for updates at bouncecreative.ie and be the first to know who's coming up next.
Every episode comes with, process images, and the materials guests brought to the conversation — the early sketches, the abandoned directions, the slides that didn't make it to the presentation. The stuff that usually ends up in the bin.
That's the bit we're interested in.
Rough Drafts is a podcast from BOUNCE — Ireland's independent platform for design thinking, process, and critical discourse.