Designing a Double Life: Rethinking Sustainable Creative Leadership

Designing a Double Life examines what it actually means to sustain ambition across multiple identities in creative work. Drawing on lived experience as a studio leader and doctoral researcher, this talk reframes the so-called double life as an ongoing design challenge rather than a productivity achievement.

The talk explores how burnout, overcommitment and exhaustion are often treated as personal shortcomings instead of structural problems. By applying research thinking to leadership, it shows how expectations, decisions and boundaries can be redesigned to support clarity, care and long-term practice without sacrificing rigour or impact.

This talk offers language for naming what many creative leaders are carrying but rarely articulate. The perspective introduced here is extended through a corresponding workshop that turns these ideas into practical tools for redesigning how creative lives and teams operate.