the shape it takes

Creativity is instinctive.

It has no set path, no modus operandi, no fixed direction, no impossible altitude. It exists in the room, long before you enter it. The room decides what you'll make in it, before you know you're making anything.

Over the years, I've worked across the various multitudes creativity embarks you on, most definite being the pen it uses as a tool to sketch, called design. And design is itself infinite. Brands, experiential, spaces, visuals, graphics. A toolkit that creativity tries to formalise its instinct with. A translator, not the language itself.

What I keep coming back to is the moment before. What do you notice when you enter a new space, before you identify objects? Can you read the atmosphere of a room and give that atmosphere tangible elements to decipher it with? Why do certain sets of creativity arrive as words and feelings long before they become anything you can point at? The room is already saying something. Most of the work is listening for it.

There's an old idea, older than any of us, that creative work isn't something we generate. It comes to us. It exists somewhere already, in the room, in the air, in the ether, and it visits the people who are available to receive it. The ancients treated it as a spirit that lived in the walls of the studio and stepped out to help. We've spent a long time pretending we outgrew that idea. I don't think we did. The best work still arrives that way, and instinct is really the name for how ready you are when it does. Instinct is what the ether is speaking to.

During one of my conversations with my founder Dibyajyoti Deb, when I asked him what's the ethos to Alchemist, he said, "Mehr, I think we're built on instinct." I pondered a lot over it. While I'm someone who predominantly works on instinct, how do I define it as something tangible that our studio does and operates out of? Alchemist isn't a studio that makes things out of nothing. It's a studio built to be available to what's already in the ether, and to have the discipline to receive it accurately. The name was never a flourish. Alchemy is transmutation, base material into something more, and the base material is what the room hands you before you've named a single object in it.

Instinct sounds soft until you look at how it actually operates. Being ready isn't mystical. Ours is pragmatic, almost mathematical. What looks from the outside like a gut call is really pattern analysis running fast, on a data set built from every room you've ever walked into. Temperature. Weight. Ratio. Material. Silence. Cadence. The things you already know, structured into a reading you can build against. Instinct without translation is taste. Instinct translated is a system, and a system is what a studio can be built on. It's also how you turn what's in the ether into something you can hand to someone else.

Which is why design inside Alchemist doesn't behave like a department. It behaves like a response. Once the room has been read and the parameters are set, the discipline the project needs announces itself. Sometimes it's a brand. Sometimes it's a space. Sometimes it's a film, a piece of writing, a cultural moment, a chess set, a document. The medium isn't decided before the reading. It's decided by it.

I've always worked this way. I've moved between graphic, spatial, editorial, digital, experiential and more throughout my whole (short) career, and for most of it I was told to pick a lane. Alchemist treats moving between lanes as the point, not the problem. Multidisciplinary here doesn't mean a plethora of services. It means the studio has been built to translate the same reading into whichever discipline the project asks for.

Somewhere early in my design life I learned that the best designers aren't imposing anything. They're listening. The set arrives last, after the text, after the atmosphere, after the meaning. The object is a response, not a proposal. I've carried that with me into every room since, and it's the closest thing I have to a working definition of what design should do.

Design as conversation, not monologue. That's the whole thing. A room, a brief, a client, a material, all of them are already speaking. Our job is to be quiet enough for long enough to hear what they're saying, and then to build the response accurately. Everything before the object is instinct doing its actual work.

So, what's in the ether at Alchemist? Whatever the room is already holding, before we walk in and pretend we brought it with us. And what we do with it - the brands we build, the spaces we shape, the campaigns we run, the cultural moments we programme, the writing we publish, the objects we make - is the studio being disciplined enough to translate that reading into whichever discipline the project asks for. We're not in the business of imposing a template on the world, or arriving with an answer already written. We're in the business of setting a tone: that before you announce, you listen. That before you make, you read. That the room already knows, and the work is worth doing only when we've been quiet enough, sharp enough, and disciplined enough to hear it accurately, then loud enough to build the response with everything we have.

Design, then, isn't what we do. It's one of the shapes instinct takes when we've read the room well enough to build. Alchemist is the room we've built to keep listening.

References & further reading

• Elizabeth Gilbert, Your Elusive Creative Genius, TED2009 — on the ancient idea of the daemon or genius as an external creative spirit, and creativity as something that comes to us rather than from us.
• Es Devlin, An Atlas of Es Devlin (Thames & Hudson, 2023) — on the designer as listener, and the set as a response to text, atmosphere, and meaning rather than a proposal.
• Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Birkhäuser, 2006) — on atmosphere as the actual subject of design, and on the material, tonal, and sensory components a space is built from before it is built from anything.