28th July 2026

Last weekend, our Chief Creative Officer, Graham Dodridge, revisited the place that shaped his creative thinking more than forty years ago.

An alumni reunion to celebrate 170 years of Arts University Plymouth. We laughed, exaggerated stories, remembered people we’d forgotten we’d forgotten, and wandered the same studios where many of us first discovered that creativity wasn’t simply something you did. It was something you became.

Standing outside the university, you can see the giant words stretched across the building: ‘The world needs creatives now more than ever.’

It makes for a great backdrop for a selfie, simply because it feels less like a slogan and more like a statement of fact.

When I arrived at art school, creativity smelled strongly of Cow Gum. It was Rotring pens. Marker layouts. Spray mount. Letraset. Wax rollers. Scalpels. Bromides. PMTs. Colour separations. Entire afternoons spent moving a headline by three millimetres because there wasn’t an ‘Undo’ button.

Then came the Macintosh II. Everyone said everything would change. They were right.

Then came desktop publishing. Then mobile phones. Then the internet. Then broadband. Then social media. Then smartphones. Then Covid, and hybrid working.

And now… AI.

Each wave arrived with exactly the same soundtrack: “This changes everything.” “The industry’s finished.” “People like us won’t survive this.”

And yet somehow, here we all are. Still creating.

Walking through this year’s Masters exhibition was unexpectedly reassuring. Much of the work wasn’t driven by technology at all. It was tactile and thoughtful – paint, photography, print, ceramics, embroidery, glassware. Ideas brought to life with hands rather than prompts. It reminded me that creativity has never actually belonged to the tools. The tools are simply what they are: tools.

The language remains human.

I found myself in the galleried halls of creative awakenings, wondering about graduates entering our industry today. No talk here of how difficult it must be for young creatives. They’ve grown up expecting change. AI doesn’t threaten their identity because it has arrived before their careers have really begun.

The bigger challenge might belong to the rest of us. Those of us who’ve become very good at doing things the way we’ve always done them. Teaching old dogs new tricks has never been easy, particularly when the old tricks have won awards, built agencies and paid mortgages.

It reminded me of one of my favourite comedy sketches.

In the famous Morecambe and Wise performance with André Previn, Previn interrupts Eric Morecambe’s gloriously chaotic piano playing.

“You’re playing all the wrong notes.”

Eric grabs him by the lapels and replies:

“I’m playing all the right notes… but not necessarily in the right order.”

I’ve always thought that line contains more wisdom than comedy. Because innovation rarely arrives as perfection. It arrives as disorder. It feels uncomfortable. Wrong. Messy.

The creative industry has never been about mastering an app. It has always been about curiosity, taste, judgement and empathy. The ability to connect ideas that nobody else thought belonged together.

AI doesn’t replace those qualities. If anything, it increases their value. Because when everyone can make something… knowing exactly what to make becomes infinitely more important.

I’ve spent over forty years watching our industry reinvent itself. Every decade someone predicts the end of creativity. And every decade, creativity quietly reinvents itself instead. The mediums evolve. The economics change. The pace accelerates. But great ideas remain astonishingly resilient.

Humans still fall in love with stories. Still buy belief before they buy products. Still remember how something made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what it said.

Leaving Plymouth, I didn’t feel nostalgic. I felt optimistic.

The Cow Gum has evaporated. The Apple Macintosh II is a museum piece. The internet has become ordinary.

AI will become ordinary too.

And when it does, something else will come along that terrifies us all over again – I guess that’s progress.

Looking back across four decades, I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be creative. Or a better time to be alive.

I believe Arts University Plymouth got it exactly right. The world doesn’t need fewer creatives because of AI.

It needs more creative people than ever before.

Not because they know the answers, but because they’re the people willing to play all the right notes…

…even if, occasionally, they’re not quite in the right order.