Supermarkets, Powerful Architecture And Niche Podcasts: Where Sanjiv Mistry Loads Up On Creativity

Foreign Supermarket

Inspiration, like hunger, is a recurring condition. You don’t cure it. You just keep feeding it. And supermarkets can be a source for both. But let’s be honest, no creative person has ever left a Tesco Express with a sudden onset of Stendhal Syndrome, spiritually overwhelmed by a shrink-wrapped brick of mild Cathedral City. But in other places, grocery shops are, well, extra mature.

Put me in a Carrefour on the outskirts of Toulouse or a 7-11 in inner city Nagasaki, and the dopamine starts to spike. It’s a bizarro world. The usual format of fruit in the front and tins in aisle four, but the fruit is rambutan, and the tins are cassoulet. It’s that gap between familiarity and difference that makes the creative connections start to spark. A disruptive riff that forces you to question what ‘normal’ means, making the mundane feel almost anthropological. The length of aisles forms a walkable bar chart of the country’s tastes. A nation’s optimism measured by the variety of its crisp range, and its melancholy by the number of pickles and ferments.

For me, getting lost in a foreign supermarket is a deeply inspirational practice. I go in hungry, and leave even hungrier.

Thomas Heatherwick

The standing ovation has lost its currency lately, being handed out (footed out?) at corporate awards dos, live podcast recordings, and school nativity plays. But when I first heard Thomas Heatherwick speak at a design conference early in my career, the five-minute ovation he received was entirely deserved. He shuffled nervously on stage, stammered as he spoke, and then effortlessly illuminated a darkened theatre with his obvious genius. He was the teacher and we were his pupils, our pupils dilating with every project he revealed.

Heatherwick’s work is part sculpture, part sermon. Architecture that always seems to ask ‘why must a building behave?’. His designs appear to have a kind of kinetic buoyancy. Concrete reinforced by wit. Wood warped against the grain. He somehow makes you believe steel can be soft, and that function can flirt with frivolity. Before the garden bridge fiasco, before the Olympic cauldron, Heatherwick’s originality was plain to see. His mind-bending, category-twisting work has inspired me for over 20 years. But still, if I ever see him on one of his London Routemaster buses, I’ll be sure to push him off the stifling upper deck (or at least I would, if the bloody windows would open wide enough).

The podcast ‘Better Known’

Who doesn’t love a shameless loophole? Saying to the genie on wish number three that you wish for three more wishes? That’s what this is. A crowbar in a format that opens hundreds of other doors of inspiration. The premise of ‘Better Known’ is simple. Each week, the guest picks six things they think deserve to be better known. A person, a place, a book, a scientific breakthrough, a period in history, a school of thought, an object, a dish…anything at all. The result is a sort of intellectual tapas, served to your podcast feed as a Sunday night snack. Its eclecticism is its brilliance. A philosopher champions a TV drama. A comedian pleads the case for a forgotten economist. A novelist elevates an obscure Carpathian recipe.

There’s no algorithm or careful curation aimed at suiting the researched-to-death data points of a particular audience demographic. Instead, it’s just enthusiasm unfiltered. Sheer promiscuity of thought. In our business, we seem to care so much about trends, we sometimes forget the power of taste.