Few speakers embody SXSW Sydney’s cross-disciplinary spirit quite like Manon Dave. The BBC’s Head of Future World Design straddles the worlds of engineering, art, music, AI, and experience design with an ease that defies industry silos.
But as Dave made clear, his hybrid approach to creativity was never a strategic masterplan. It came from a simple impulse: a lifelong urge to “make cool shit”, even if he didn’t fit the mould of a painter, composer, or traditional creative.
“I wished I was a visual artist. I wished I was a musician,” he told The Growth Distillery’s Dan Krigstein on the Rules Don’t Apply podcast. “[But] I didn’t have the talent or the perseverance to zoom in on one thing for 10,000 hours… but that didn’t take away from the itch that I wanted to scratch, which was to make stuff.”
Over the years, Dave noticed something. As creativity leaned further into technology, technologists increasingly wanted a seat at the creative table, and artists wanted deeper fluency in tech. And now, this cultural cross-pollination, he argued, is no longer optional. “Technology and creativity are inherently intertwined,” he explained. “Now more so than ever, there’s a true convergence of these.”
Art meets algorithm
Dave rejected the common fear narrative around AI and automation. Instead, he viewed algorithmic tools as enablers, levelling forces that expand who gets to create and how. But as these systems become more powerful, he believed the undervalued superpower isn’t technical skill; it’s perspective.
Referencing Mo Gawdat’s talk earlier in the week, Dave said one of AI’s biggest leaps will be the rise of agentic teams – multiple AIs peer-reviewing each other, mirroring how human teams would share feedback to one another when building a product. What those systems emulate, at their core, is perspective, which is crucial to creativity.
“It is literally us building alternate perspectives and brains within this artificial intelligence ecosystem,” he said. “And what is innately powered as a methodology in our brain is to be empathetic. Not in the DEI sense of empathy, but in the very practical method of empathy. Which is to zoom out, have almost an out of body experience, and then look back at what you are up to through a third perspective.”
“And today that is, I would say, especially in these industries, the most underutilised skillset as humans that we are applying. We do retrospectives at the end of a product sprint, for example, to put it in a very practical sense. Why is that not a mechanism we use whilst we are actually in the process of working?”
Dan Krigstein
The Netflix problem
One of Dave’s most compelling frameworks is what he calls “the Netflix problem” – the paralysis of infinite choice. As AI multiplies the number of possible directions any idea can take, the only constraint left is a person’s own imagination.
“With infinite power at your fingertips… the main bottleneck is your own imagination,” he said. “Blank canvas syndrome or writer’s block… feels like it’s reserved for a creative process. I don’t think that’s by mistake. We exercise our more mechanical parts of our brain a lot more than we do the creative ones.”
The solution isn’t glamorous. For Dave, it’s making space for boredom or “noodling around” and making stuff. Watching unrelated TV. Playing FIFA. Treating creative exploration not as a hobby, but a necessity. “If I call it a hobby then I’m kind of f*cking myself,” he said. “These are things that I have to do, cause if I don’t do them, I’ll cease to exist in my preferred form.”
When to kill an idea
In a world obsessed with “failing fast”, Dave’s approach is surprisingly simple: “Would you use it, or would a person you know in your life, not the persona that was researched by the agency for six weeks, use it?” If the answer is no, he said, kill it early.
But sometimes ideas don’t need to die, they just need to wait.
Dave shared two passion projects that were technologically possible but “too early”. One was System, an award-winning physical instrument for generative music created back in 2018, the same year the transformer architecture (the foundation of modern AI) was published.
The other, Block Crumb, was a blockchain-based attribution system designed to fairly credit, and pay, creators whose work influences other work, a problem that has now exploded into the centre of global AI policy.
The new frontier: Formats
Looking ahead, the opportunity that excites Dave most isn’t a technology, it’s format innovation. New ways of experiencing stories, media and interaction. He points to Netflix’s “Bandersnatch” as an early example – a choose-your-own-adventure episode of “Black Mirror” – something he described as groundbreaking but ultimately too resource-intensive to scale.
“‘Bandersnatch’ was choose-your-own-adventure, and it was a really great piece of content, I thought it was really innovative. And it shot subscribers through the roof for that period of time, but then it disappeared,” he said.
“We try to shoehorn new technological advancements into existing economic infrastructures, industrial infrastructures and ultimately formats. And I get really excited about the new formats, the new ways of looking at things. The truth is, it [‘Bandersnatch’] was a fantastic execution of something that I think is a future format, but production costs and just the time and money and effort and investment it took to do that all the time as a genre was just too much.”
He said creatives need to “keep making those ‘Bandersnatch’ moments” to accelerate the next format of consumption.
He noted that OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s design firm to build a next-generation AI device is a signal of this shift. “[They’ve] just had to spend billions of dollars on bringing in the designers… So I think there is a massive currency around format design.”
Dave’s advice
For creatives and technologists hoping to follow a similar path, Dave emphasised one thing: declare your interests loudly and shamelessly. Not to self-promote, but to be seen. Many of his opportunities emerged because colleagues, bosses and even CEOs knew he made music, experimented with tools, or cared about design.
“You never know what other people are into,” he said. “Chance encounters only happen if you kind of shamelessly declare what you’re about.”
But don’t mistake generalism for drifting. “Generalism without output is the misconception,” he warned.
“The things that have allowed me to be in the seat.. What happens if I don’t do any new shit for five years? Are you still gonna have me in the seat? So I think the, the fact is that the relentless pursuit of the output, of actually like producing the thing and then pushing out into the world and making sure that whatever your multi-threaded generalist pursuits are, results in something that you can.”