#50. If you had to go to a desert island, what would you bring?
From the section “Summer Edition” of The Sunday Tales.
The Sunday Tales Summer Edition 2026 will explore topics from my upcoming book. As such, these newsletters will read differently, offering you a sneak peek into my way of working. I hope they will also inspire some healthy discussions!
It is the oldest thought experiment in the world: You are going to a desert island. What do you bring?
Books, people say. Music. A knife. Someone they love.
Syros, 2026. My morning swim brings so much inspiration.
Because I actually live on an island.
Not a desert one: Syros is a small Cycladic island in the Aegean, with a proper city, a few big supermarkets, a small market for groceries, a handful of good restaurants and bars, an international community, and a design studio I have been running for fourteen years. Next week I also turn another year older, and those fourteen years as a freelancer complete their own small circle at the same time.
Fourteen years on an island teaches you something. Not about survival (there are ferries and WiFi all over the island!), but about the quiet risk of isolation. Distance from the mainland is not just geographical.
It is professional, cultural, social. Without the right tools, an island can shrink your world.
Imagination is the tool that has kept my world open
This is newsletter fifty. I wanted to dedicate it to the thing I am most grateful for and to explain why, if I really had to pack for a desert island, I would leave almost everything behind and bring only this: the ability to imagine. Because with it, you can figure out the rest.
This thought happened last week, when artist, writer, and director Danielle M. Oke asked me a series of questions about creativity for her practice. Answering her carefully reminded me of what I know but do not always say.
She asked what being creative means to me. I said it is the ability to make connections where no one else sees any. Putting two unrelated things side by side and finding that together they say something new.
On a desert island, that is exactly what saves you. You look at what is around you (a vine, a rock, a piece of fabric) and you see what it could become.
In my book, I write that imagination is nourished by three qualities: inventiveness, playfulness, and bravery. Together they are what allow the mind to conceive new things, rather than repeat what already exists. Separately, each one does something different.
Inventiveness
Inventiveness is the discipline of looking at the ordinary as if for the first time, and letting it surprise you.
Bruno Munari looked at a pair of women's tights and a lobster trap and made a the famous Falkland lamp out of it. He borrowed the shape from one world and the material from another. On the island, that is the only kind of thinking that works.
It is also the quality I guard most carefully against the pull of automation.
AI, as I write in my book, is habit made into a machine: it works within what already exists, recombining patterns it has already seen. It cannot be astonished.
Inventiveness does not come from that. It comes from experiencing the real world: from seeing the vine and the rock and imagining the thing they could become together.
A small interruption…
Imagination without methodology won't help you build brands that last.
This is what I teach at Design Brands that Last, a live brand strategy programme for everyone who shapes brands and wants a methodology rigorous enough to drive and defend their creative work!
Ps. The subscribers of my newsletter receive an exclusive subscriber discount of 20%!
Playfulness
The second quality is playfulness. Danni asked how creativity shows up in my daily life, and I told her: it is like looking into the fridge and cooking something lovely out of just a few ingredients. On a desert island, that is not a metaphor: it is the whole situation. Playfulness is what turns constraint into possibility. It is adding something extraordinary to the ordinary, not despite the limits but because of them.
Bravery
It is the last quality. You need it to commit to a direction and stop second-guessing. Imagination dies the moment you start editing it for approval, and on a desert island, there is no committee. You decide, and then you act.
If you can imagine, you can build
I live on an island and I have learnt to treat these three qualities as infrastructure.
They are why I built the Creative Exchange, why I organise workshops like the upcoming Design Brands that Last, why I have interns come and work beside me in my studio in Syros.
Creativity is not something I practise in isolation: it is something I teach, share, and keep alive by surrounding myself with people who are also working to nourish it.
An island that has no connection to the mainland becomes a desert island eventually. Imagination is the ferry that allows you travel elsewhere.
Fifty newsletters in, and this is the one thing I know for certain: if you can imagine, you can build. If you can build, you are never truly alone.