How do you build a design career that spans continents, cultures and scale, and then redesign your life after a wake-up call? 

Rido Pin is a Director at Plus Studio, a solutions company for the built environment, with 11 studios across Australia and New Zealand and projects worldwide. Originally from the Netherlands, Rido’s journey has taken him from cycling the fields of Holland, to island life in Curaçao, to New York skyscrapers, and finally to Sydney, where he now helps lead Plus Studio’s rapid growth. 

This conversation comes at a milestone moment: last week, Frost* unveiled Plus Studio’s new brand refresh, reflecting its collaborative culture and future vision. 

Listen in as Vince and Rido talk about the launch of the new brand identity and what it means for Plus Studio, his career, and how resilience and well-being have shaped his leadership and outlook on life. 

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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 in the Thames Valley and inspired by architecture from an early age, Ajaz began working at a software company as a teenager, driven by obsession with design and a fascination with business. His story is one of ambition, humility and reinvention. 

Listen in as Vince and Ajaz unpack the role of AI in creativity, the myth of scaling and mediocrity, and why having taste still matters more than ever. 

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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 College of Art in London. The studio’s work is underpinned by its extensive research into the possibilities of technology, materials and making processes. They’ve collaborated with the V&A in London to Friedman Benda in New York, plus luxury brands including Hermès, Swarovski and BMW and work by the studio is held in numerous important collections worldwide.

Listen in as Vince and Paul discuss how to be human in the era of AI, stretching ideas at the Royal Academy of Arts with Ron Arad and why working in the public realm matters to him. 

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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 20 years. His work exceeds traditional craftsmanship. Through effort, imagination and genuine collaborations with exceptionally skilled and open-minded craftspeople his collections transcend. A telltale sign of what was to come, his first prototypes were picked up by Bergdorf Goodman.

Listen in as Vince and Elad discuss studying at the same design school as Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz, working with the Haas Brothers on making monsters, and the unbridled joy of bringing someone new into your creative practice.

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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 delivers timeless, sustainable built environments with a collaborative approach and focus on research-driven sustainable solutions.  

 Listen in wherever you get your podcasts as Vince and Keith discuss how his Grandmother helped build the Apollo spacecrafts, the strengths and limitations of creative intuition and why it takes years to truly become a leader. 

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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 led galleries all over the world, from the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, to the J Paul Getty Museum in LA and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

He started his career as curator of Asian art at the National Gallery of Australia under the iconic James Mollison. Brand is a scholar of Indian and Islamic art, architecture and landscape design and has led these world-class art museums at some of the most challenging in their history.

Listen in as Vince and Michael discuss trying to be ethical in the art world, falling in love with Asian art in Nepal aged 15 and being sent to NYC by Frank Robertson to buy art. 

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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 form the basis of her work, and led her practice to win the Australian Institute of Architects ‘Best in Practice Prize in 2024.

Listen in as Vince and Eva-Marie discuss drawing Sydney’s heritage Finger Wharf to scale by hand as a graduate, what it means to be a B Corp Certified architecture practice and how everything she designs stems from place. 

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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, Lily believes true luxury should be both beautiful and responsible. 

Listen in as Vince and Lily discuss Invisible Collection’s NYC debut in an apartment designed by Pierre Yovanovitch, French craftsmanship, and the unique differences between French and American interior design. 

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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 culture — from Portland’s creative scene to global fashion trends — reflecting on the magic of seeing your designs in the real world, and the emotional power shoes carry. He speaks about the evolution of the industry, from boutique stores to collectors, and the growing wave of fashion brands entering the sneaker space. 

Listen in as Vince and Chris discuss the connection between footwear design, car design and typography, why he believes every brand has a voice, and what it’s like inside his creative process, where sketches, nostalgia, and conversation feed innovation.  

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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 and London, with a lot of travel around the world in between, Elie has been innovating for cities for over 20 years. His work is consistently sensitive to human scale, urban context, and sustainability. Some of the more famous projects he has worked on at KPF are the Seaport Square Master Plan and Channelside in Boston, Atlantis The Royal in Dubai and NYU Shanghai.  

As a kid, everything was about buildings. Drawing them, looking at them, reading about them. After high school, he spent a summer at Cornell University, to see if he was cut out for his life’s ambition. Unsurprisingly, he was. Much of his time is still spent at school; he’s taught studios at his alma maters, Cornell and Harvard. He was an adjunct professor at NYIT for eight years and has served as a guest critic at Yale to name a few.  

Listen in as Vince and Elie discuss how 100 years ago New York was the Dubai of the times, the concept of Central Social Districts, and why he has Ganesha, the god of wisdom, mischief and fun on his desk.  

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