By day two, the spectacle starts to feel legible.

You begin to recognise the people you’ve only known through case studies and credits. And they’re not intimidating in the way you’d imagined. They’re easy. Quick. Funny. A little sunburnt. Effortless in a way that feels annoyingly natural.

They carry decades of experience, but the same energy as the people you sit next to in class. Just sharper. More certain. It does something to your sense of time. The distance between 'them' and 'you' shrinks.

In the academy, we’re lucky enough to hear from them directly. To begin, we heard from Ger Roe at Publicis Ireland, whose multiple-award-winning Heineken work leaned into cultural insights from a country with such a strong pub culture. The campaigns felt less like ads and more like people-first storytelling: The Pub That Refuses to Die, long-form and almost documentary-like, and activations like McLoughlin’s Pub.

Then Fernando Machado. On ideas, he was blunt: data helps, but it doesn’t convince the people who actually sign things off. “It’s your data, not the CFO’s. Why would he trust it?” What lands is the idea.

And on design, he put it plainly: “To change perception, not leveraging design is like having the money to build a house and not hiring an architect.”

He spoke about Burger King and the decision to redesign the grill so the flame is visible. You don’t say 'flame-grilled.' You show it.

Later, a session on idea assassins, the people and phrases that quietly kill good work. “This won’t work for our audience.” “We’ve tried this before.” You could map faces to each line. It was insightful, funny, and almost painfully familiar.

Somewhere in between, we ended up on the red carpet, taking photos with our dean, Al Kelly, and our tutor, Jillian Nguyen.

I wandered off for a while after the day ended and joined five strangers who became teammates for exactly one hour. It was my first game of Pétanque, and I contributed very little to our strategy and a lot to our loss. I prefer to think of my approach to it as a creative reinterpretation of the game, in the spirit of the week.

Off to the Gutter Bar now, to continue yesterday’s research. 

More soon.

The author is designer, Lopez Design.