What happens when you combine a love of design with a mind for business? For Ajaz Ahmed, it meant building one of the world’s most successful creative companies from scratch before starting all over again. Ajaz is the visionary founder of AKQA, the global digital agency that he grew to 5,000 staff across 30 countries. After three decades at the helm, he stepped down and launched Studio One, an agile new venture built for the AI age, where creativity is unleashed and hierarchy stripped back. Born...
Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 8Ep. 14
Growing up in North London in the 80s, no one was talking about art or design. Life was about conversations with neighbours on the street, the good and the not so good. Four decades later, Paul Cocksedge’s work is grounded in these formative years. Known for his unorthodox approach to materials in works that span public art, sculpture and architectural installation, everything he designs is about human connection. Paul founded his eponymous studio with Joana Pinho in 2004, they met at the Royal ...
Jul 21, 2025•59 min•Season 8Ep. 13
When Elad Yifrach was growing up his art teacher mother would entertain he and his sisters by setting up art projects on their dining room table. It wasn’t long before his bedroom was home to stacks of magazines covered in sticky notes, and he was studying a unique architecture and interior design course at Technion, “kind of like the MIT of Israel”. Yifrach is the Founder and Creative Director of L’OBJET, where he’s been bringing collections of the highest quality artistic objects to life for 2...
Jul 07, 2025•52 min•Season 8Ep. 12
Keith Hempel always knew he was going to be an architect. Growing up in Southern California with a creative mother and a technical father, he seemed destined for the vocation. A transformative, “eye opening” and “earth shattering” year studying the craft in Florence set him on his way. Today, he helps lead a cohort of over 500 architects, engineers, landscape architects, interior designers and planners in his role as President/Chief Design Officer at LPA Design Studios. The integrated firm deliv...
Jun 23, 2025•48 min•Season 8Ep. 11
As a teenager, Dr Michael Brand experienced moving from Canberra to Washington as both traumatic and exciting. It was on a journey back to Australia via family in Nepal with his brother, they were aged 15 and 18 respectively, that he first experienced Islamic art. He can trace a direct line from that experience to his field of study and life’s work. Brand has recently retired as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, after guiding it through the most significant transformation in its history. He’s ...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 8Ep. 10
The question of living well is a big one. What does it actually mean? For Eva-Marie Prineas, home is where the heart is, and the way a home is planned has the most impact in how it feels to inhabit when it’s complete. Prineas founded her eponymous architecture practice in 2004. Perhaps unsurprising considering she would sit in the back yard of her family home in suburban Sydney and sketch the roofline. Her background and passion for heritage conservation and environmentally low-impact design for...
May 26, 2025•50 min•Season 8Ep. 9
Lily Froehlicher inherited a love of luxury from her mother and a passion for travel from her father—interests that shaped her desire to create beautiful experiences for others. After studying in Paris, Shanghai, and London, and gaining experience at Hermès and Chanel, she joined Invisible Collection at its inception. Now Managing Director, she leads the online platform connecting design lovers with handmade, limited-edition furniture by top global designers. A strong advocate for sustainability...
May 12, 2025•55 min•Season 8Ep. 8
Once a music-obsessed kid dreaming of designing record covers, Chris Law found his rhythm in the world of sneakers. The iconic shoe designer, known by everyone who’s anyone in the sneaker world, shares how hip-hop culture, graphic design, and a love for storytelling led him to work on some of the most famous sneaker designs, ever. “Icons that are so big in the history of sneakers,” including the Adidas Superstar and Converse Chuck Taylor. In this episode, Chris unpacks the heart of sneaker cultu...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 8Ep. 7
Growing up in public housing on Roosevelt Island in the middle of New York City’s East River, Elie Gamburg went to sleep every night staring at the city’s remarkable skyline from his bedroom window. His father was an artist and his mother a mathematician, so, “I guess I sort of had to do architecture if nothing else.” Gamburg is a Design Principal at KPF, a global architecture firm known for designing some of the most innovative and high-profile buildings around the world. Working from New York ...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 8Ep. 6
As an architect, are you influenced by the environment you grew up in, even if your work looks vastly different to where you spent your formative years? John Pawson thinks so. He grew up in the north of England in the 1950s with his four sisters, playing with kids from houses around their family home. Despite being a master of minimalism, he grew up in a house that was quite the opposite. John Pawson CBE has spent over forty years making rigorously simple architecture. His work spans everything ...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 8Ep. 5
Children of immigrants are often hard workers; they’re under pressure to live up to their parents’ dreams. And it’s often thought that creativity and hard work don’t go hand in hand. Jean Lin has proven quite the opposite. Growing up in Massachusetts she was aware she came from a different place to her friends. But she credits her different upbringing, one focused on valuing family, hard work, integrity, with her success. Lin is the founder and gallerist of the downtown NYC design gallery and st...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 8Ep. 4
Is it better to start a business with a fully fleshed out plan? Or can passion be the driver for success? In the case of George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, intent is everything. And you can achieve global success and excellence in your field “while still being fun and nice”. The partners in business and life founded their international creative design studio, Yabu Pushelberg, in 1980 with curiosity, passion and energy, and have been creating immersive environments and design considered products e...
Mar 03, 2025•49 min•Season 8Ep. 3
Does having a social agenda matter when you’re a landscape architect? At first, you may not think so. But when you truly understand the impact a compassionate designer can make on the spaces we inhabit, the answer is clear. Sacha Coles is a Global Design Director at ASPECT Studios and founder of the design practice’s Sydney studio. As a global design influencer, Sacha leads projects of transformational change spanning placemaking, infrastructure, play space, academic, civic institutions, and gre...
Feb 17, 2025•59 min•Season 8Ep. 2
Being a change-maker in the humanitarian space is universally understood to be driven by the desire to help others. Equally, a love of travel and being motivated by difficult and hard to manage problems can be a huge benefit to working in the sector. Thanks to parents who were avid travellers, and her childhood home in Massachusetts being filled with foreign exchange students, Jocelyn Wyatt grew up curious about the world. After completing a BA in Anthropology at Grinnell College and an MBA from...
Feb 03, 2025•53 min•Season 8Ep. 1
We’re kicking off the new year by hearing from two internationally acclaimed experts in data-driven cross-sector insights and global market intelligence. We hope the takeaways from this conversation helps set you up for a dynamic 2025. When you’ve been in business together for 25 years, and life partners for 30, parameters are important. Almost as important as knowing the right parameters to put into your AI tool to get a reliable result. Martin Raymond and Chris Sanderson are expert at both. As...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 25
Designing sustainable tall buildings is no mean feat. Especially when the average lifespan of a commercial office building can be as little as 20 years. Oliver Tyler, Managing Director of WilkinsonEyre, one of the world’s leading architecture firms, spends his time doing exactly that. Delivering projects like the Battersea Power Station redevelopment and the award winning 8 Bishopsgate building in London with engineering and sustainability at the forefront. He’s helped build some of the most rem...
Dec 16, 2024•53 min•Season 7Ep. 24
This 150th episode, part two, of Design Your Life coincides with the 30th anniversary of Frost*collective. If you tuned in to Episode 150, you’ll know that over recent weeks, we’ve asked our audience to ask Vince anything. In this episode, you’ll hear his son Luca Frost ask Vince a selection of these questions and interview him about what motivated him to move his life and business to Australia, and the failures and successes along the way. If you’re not familiar with our host, Vince Frost is th...
Dec 02, 2024•58 min•Season 7Ep. 23
Welcome to episode 150! This week, we’re turning the mic on our host. In a serendipitous turn of events, this 150th episode of Design Your Life coincides with the 30th anniversary of Vince Frost’s other baby, his strategic creative studio, Frost*collective. Over recent weeks, we’ve asked our listeners and social media followers to ask Vince anything, and today his eldest son, Luca Frost, is in the interviewer’s chair. If you’re not familiar with our host, Vince Frost is the Founder, CEO and Exec...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 22
Collette Dinnigan has a storied history as one of Australia’s must successful fashion designers. Ever. But that’s just one chapter of her creative life. Her adventurous spirit and love of colour, fabric and proportion make total sense in the context of her childhood. In the mid 70s, her father built a yacht and set sail from Durbin, South Africa for the world with his young family. When they settled in New Zealand her creative mother got involved in textile design, Collette would get the remnant...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 21
Born in the small town of Hastings, New Zealand, Derek grew up in a working-class family with limited financial means and modest aspirations. His unexpected passion for photography ignited when he was a young bank teller and noticed a wedding photographer's bank statement, revealing the potential to make a living from photography. This serendipitous moment set Derek on a journey that has taken him around the world, from Sydney to Los Angeles, London, and back to Sydney. Along the way, he has wor...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 7Ep. 20
In some families, the parents’ DNA instructs so clearly the way their children think and work that it’s impossible to deny the familial impact. Jason Bruges is the product of just this. His dad was a software and computer engineer, and his mother a trained artist. Both influenced where and how he came to be a multidisciplinary artist and designer. His eponymous Jason Bruges Studio is internationally renowned for creating interactive spaces and surfaces that sit between the world of architecture,...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 7Ep. 19
In today’s economy, people are more considerate about what they’ll spend money on, retailers have to fight to hold or grow their market share. If there’s one person who knows this better than most, and will be the first to step into the ring, it’s Felicity McGahan. McGahan is the Group CEO of STRAND, the Australian handbags and luggage retailer, where she is leading a transformational vision for growth by modernising, digitising and internationalising every aspect of the business. Backed up by 2...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 18
What does it mean to exist professionally as an artist? Does being business minded compromise an artist’s creativity? If it’s a frank discussion on the topic you’re after, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is the artist to have it with. Nithiyendran is a Sri Lankan born contemporary artist whose work is often described as bold, hyperbolic, exaggerated and expressive. He’s achieved huge success in his decade-long career — his artwork has been presented in museums, festivals and the public domain, includi...
Sep 09, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 7Ep. 17
Some people take a lifetime to find their true north, the thing they want to spend their days working on. That’s not the case for Sean Perkins. Growing up in South Yorkshire in the 70s, it wasn’t cool to get good grades. Even though he was smart, he flunked almost everything. Everything, but art. From a young age he was exposed to, “the future, all this incredible visual culture”, by way of Japanese mementos his dad would bring back from work trips to Tokyo. And the fashion his mum would wear af...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 16
Not every path to success is a straight one. Mike Tosetto knows this firsthand. From growing up in Sydney’s Inner West as a skate kid who took photos with a disposable camera of the local street art — or, as her calls it, ‘mad graph’ — to living out back for two years at Ayres Rock Resort, to playing didgeridoo on stage at the Glastonbury music festival. His path has been anything but direct. After realising his job at a supermarket chain wasn’t going anywhere, he got a job at a publishing house...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 15
Hurricane Katrina and the Northern Rivers Floods may have happened over a decade apart and on opposite sides of the world. But the disasters have a lot in common. New Orleans and Lismore found themselves caught in the eye of the storm when the cities, both located for prosperity around a major waterway but on compromised ground, were inundated by water and devastated in the process. The other thing these disasters have in common are Elizabeth Mossop and Dan Etheridge. The academics met in New Or...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 7Ep. 14
How much does your environment shape your life, and what can city-makers do to make our lives better? Michael Stott has spent over 25 years crafting narratives for cities around the world, considering how they can be made better for the people who inhabit them. As Head of Cities and Places, Masterplanning & Urban Design at DBI, one of Australia’s foremost multidisciplinary design practices, he’s at the forefront of Brisbane’s evolution as a global city in time for the 2032 Olympics. Stott gr...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 7Ep. 13
In life and in business, how big a part does luck play in our success? And are our good ideas really good at all? Professor Frederik Anseel is the newly appointed Dean of the University of New South Wales’ Business School and an expert in what works, and what doesn’t, in business. He’s spent his career researching organisational psychology, leadership, how to motivate people, how to treat colleagues with respect and how to be authentic. It’s this combination of the study of management and psycho...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 7Ep. 12
In the 80s, Stiff Records, the British independent Punk Rock and New Wave record label, had an open-door policy. You could walk in and pick up posters, stickers and pin badges most days of the week. Jeremy Leslie was one of the kids doing just that. He’d catch the bus over to Notting Hill from the London College of Design to visit the shop. Originally, he was there for the music, but it was the storytelling in the design that made a lasting impression. Leslie is an internationally recognised cre...
Jun 17, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 7Ep. 11
You could argue a lot of kids grow up with a love of drawing. This one knew he wanted to be an architect in high school. When his older brother brought home some Rotring pens, it all clicked. Domenic Alvaro is the Director and Global Design Leader at Woods Bagot, one of the world’s leading architecture firms. Drawing is a huge part of his professional practice to this day. He’s a long-term collaborator of Frost*collective and someone the studio is immensely proud to have worked with over the yea...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 7Ep. 10
