Building the Space
What I found consistently was that designers wanted to reconnect with the experimental side of their practice, surround themselves with people who were asking questions rather than sharing tips or polished award-winning work. They wanted rigour and play in the same space, and time to reflect on their practice.
BOUNCE set out to build that space, examining process as a core philosophy of the work. That it has grown beyond the annual event into; workshops, design challenges, a new podcast, and a community, speaks to how real that need was in the first place.
Each year the event is underpinned by a theme and for 2027 it is Friction, exploring what it means to resist, slow down, and make things that could only come from you. The curated lineup, assembled via an open call, which is open now, brings together international speakers and Irish talent, with a particular focus on practitioners who don't typically take to a stage but who are doing genuinely interesting work, with or without the armour of a social media following. What I’d love to see this year are those practitioners who are quietly building their practice step into the spotlight. Experience in public speaking is not necessary, if chosen, speakers can avail of coaching to prepare for the leap to stage.
From event to action
The Design Challenge came directly from feedback after the first event. Speakers who discussed projects of purpose and intent struck a nerve, and attendees began asking not just how to get better at what they do, but whether what they do is aligned with anything that actually matters, with purpose and change.
The 2025 Challenge, in partnership with A Playful City, took on Drury Street: a flashpoint for every argument Dublin is having with itself about public space, inclusion, youth culture, and who the city is actually for. Eleven participants spanning graphic design, service design, architecture, multimedia, education and community practice produced thought provoking ideas, which were exhibited during Irish Design Week and open to the public. BOUNCE's founding conviction is that design is not only a commercial skill, but a social and civic practice, and making that legible to wider audiences is itself part of the work.
For a mid-career designer, the Challenge is permission to work without a conventional brief to follow curiosity instead of scope and to collaborate with people outside their own discipline and discover that this friction is productive. Subsequent Challenges have partnered with Education and Training Boards Ireland (ETBI), with more in development for later in the year. A Case Study is published after each one, such that the thinking can be adapted and adopted to other contexts. The documentation really matters, to show external audiences how the design community can support change across organisations, systems, cities and beyond so sharing knowledge is key to the work.
The process, not the portfolio
The podcast, Rough Drafts, extends the same logic. It is not show-and-tell but an exploration of what creative practice actually looks like from the inside: ambiguous, iterative, collaborative, and often uncertain. Long-form conversations about the messy middle, the projects that didn't work, the decisions that looked wrong at the time and turned out to be right, the moments of doubt that preceded the best work. The process, not the portfolio.
What Ireland actually has
I believe Irish design has matured over the last few decades and I am an advocate for giving it the platform it deserves, not unlike the work of the Archive itself. There can be a tendency, when talking about design events in small countries, to reach for comparison with bigger ones as a way of establishing legitimacy. I am not interested in that framing because Ireland has something different: a small, densely connected community where practitioners actually know each other, where the distance between a graduate and a studio director is genuinely short, where interdisciplinary work happens because everyone knows someone from another discipline. BOUNCE tries to embody this closeness where everyone matters, and the audience is not reduced to a sea of people at an event.
How it Stays Alive
BOUNCE will only exist while it is relevant to the community it serves. The thing about independent design platforms: if you don't use them, you lose them.
BOUNCE runs on a combination of ticket revenue, challenge partnerships, and a growing subscription audience on Patreon — and the balance between those things is always closer than it looks from the outside. What keeps it viable and independent is not one large grant or one corporate sponsor with an agenda. It is the accumulated support of a community that values what it's doing and acts on that value in concrete ways. Besides attending events, simple things like sharing our announcements, open calls or case studies, all help support it.
In a practical sense, BOUNCE would not exist without Language Studio, Hedgehogs V Foxes, and Sooner Than Later. These are strategic relationships with organisations that believe in what I am trying to do and back it with actual resources — design, print, video, event production. Seeing BOUNCE's identity make the 2024 Archive is a testament to the strength of that partnership and the creative work that continues to evolve with each edition.
The January event. The Challenge. The podcast Rough Drafts. All of it points in the same direction: toward a design community that is more curious, more connected, more willing to ask harder questions, and more capable of doing something with the answers.
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Open Call Information: https://www.bouncecreative.ie/open-call
BOUNCE 2027 takes place on 15th January 2027at Trinity College Dublin.
Early Bird Tickets are on sale now: https://www.bouncecreative.ie/tickets
Rough Drafts is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Subscribe to Bounce's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BOUNCEcreative