This episode features a conversation with Tom Donaldson, Senior Vice President at the LEGO Group and the leader of Creative Play Lab, LEGO’s behind-the-scenes R&D and disruptive innovation group. Tom explains how Creative Play Lab is tasked with pioneering the future of play, combining deep engineering in electronics, firmware, and mechatronics with LEGO’s long-standing commitment to creativity and physical building.

We focus on Smart Play and the new smart brick platform unveiled at CES, exploring why LEGO views it as a multi-year platform rather than a single product. Tom breaks down how an ordinary-looking brick contains sophisticated sensing, sound, light, and brick-to-brick awareness, all designed to respond naturally to how kids play. The conversation reveals how LEGO hides significant technical complexity behind simple, intuitive experiences, and why this approach represents an important step in how the company is thinking about the future of play.

An Exclusive Look Inside the Lego Group’s Super Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future of Play

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In this conversation, 3D street artist Nate Baranowski walks through how an unconventional creative career actually works in practice—from getting paid to draw chalk in college, to building a global niche creating anamorphic illusions for brands, festivals, and public spaces. What looks playful and ephemeral from the outside turns out to require deep discipline: idea filtering, client negotiation, physical endurance, and an almost obsessive attention to perspective.

Throughout the interview, Nate shares hard-earned insights about creativity that apply far beyond street art: why execution matters more than novelty, why clients don’t want to stand inside advertisements, how constraints improve creative work, and how new tools like VR can fundamentally reshape a craft. The result is a grounded, honest look at what it takes to make creative work that actually connects.

Nate's Instagram

Want more Creative Effort? You can read a version of this interview and sign up for the email version at creativeeffort.substack.com