“Architecture should bring a true sensation of wellbeing. We were really lucky to experience that as children, and now as architects, we try to bring all that we learned into our practice.”

Salwa and Selma Mikou are the founders of Paris-based Mikou Architecture. Born in Fez, Morocco and educated in Paris, they have spent the last two decades reimagining the relationship between the built environment and the cultural landscape.

After honing their craft under two of the world’s most iconic architects, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano, they founded their own studio. For them, architecture is a living interaction with landscape and what they call the Atlas of Resonance, interpreting the hidden layers of a territory, geology, memory, and craft. It is a philosophy that rejects the generic, seeking instead to weave together technological innovation with local materials. Whether it is a mosque in the north of England or a hybrid innovation hub in a former royal manufactory, their work asks a fundamental question: How does space shape the way we think, learn and remember?

They were selected by Rem Koolhaas to represent Morocco at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, they were commissioned by Hermès to create a 17,000-square-meter facility that bridges industrial performance with poetic expression. At the heart of their practice is a belief that architecture is not just about building—it’s about shaping relationships: between people, between past and future, between technology and craft.

(0:04) The Intuitive Knowledge of Living Art

(4:24) The Medina and the Geometry of Childhood

(8:18) The Social Spaces of Rooftops

(13:46) The Intuitive Knowledge of Living Art

(15:31) Contextual Echoes & Traces of the Site

(19:18) The Twin Dynamic and Confrontation with 'l'autre'

(26:42) The Temples of Water

(33:24) The Mosque as Pure Spatiality

(38:01) The Crisis Period and Structural Systems

(48:24) Building Culture with Yves Saint Laurent & Pierre Bergé

(51:38) The Wast ed-dar (وسط الدار) and the Heart of a Building

(57:02) Preserving the Human Core of Expression

(1:04:29) Urban Acupuncture in the Modern City

(1:08:46) The Smells and Sounds of Home

(1:10:02) Balance, Nature, and Sisterhood

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and teaching frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. Of course, I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the future of the economy and automation. The main things I'm trying to teach in the book are skills around creativity, critical thinking, community compassion and frameworks around how to go and use that on problems that should be relatively portable to a bunch of problems that are meaningful to you. The way that education needs to change is that people need to actively be working on things that truly matter to them so that over time they end up being able to go make that difference.”

Tom Chi is a physicist, designer, inventor, and investor whose work has shaped everything from Google Glass and rapid prototyping at Google X to some of the most ambitious climate technologies being built today. He’s now the founding partner of At One Ventures, where he invests in deep-tech companies focused on a bold goal: a world where humanity is a net positive to nature.

Tom’s new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, reframes economics itself—not as a fixed law, but as a design discipline that can be reimagined to align with the physical realities of our planet. Drawing on science, systems thinking, and lessons from nature, the book offers a grounded, practical framework for moving beyond both climate doom and empty optimism—and toward real, regenerative solutions. Today’s conversation is about what Tom calls the 4Cs: Capital, Compassion, Climate, and Community—but also about agency, responsibility, and what becomes possible when we stop treating the future as something that happens to us and start designing it deliberately.

(0:00) Overcoming Powerlessness through Creativity, Critical Thinking, Community Compassion

Why broad hopelessness about the future is a purposeful tactic to maintain the status quo.

(7:16) How average temperature metrics fail to communicate the true danger of extreme climate volatility.

(11:54) Economics as Design

(17:11) Multi-disciplinary Learning Centered on Real-World Impact

(26:12) Local Resilience

(31:15) Tax & Capital Misallocation

(36:52) Build Integrity

(45:32) AI and Robotics in Agriculture

(51:08) The First Honeybee Vaccine

(56:11) The Entropy Curve of Pollution

(1:15:31) Human-Centric AI

Flipping the priority of automation to serve the collective good rather than enriching a select few

(1:20:59) Thinking in Pictures

How learning to communicate and problem-solve without language fueled a career in deep tech invention

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion.

Haskell has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.

His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.

(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World

(1:33) Networked Connection is the Foundation of Life

(2:00) Contemplating the Small

(4:07) Consciousness, Intelligence & Memory in the More-Than-Human-World

(4:18) We Are Grass Apes

(5:41) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids

(6:34) The Networked Intelligence of Forests

(7:45) The Earth in Full Song

(8:46) The Practice of Listening

(10:11) Escaping the Screen: Real Connections in the Classroom

(11:35) The True Cost of AI

(12:11) Transforming Ourselves

(14:23) Silence Without Expectation

(15:32) A Sensory Legacy for the Future

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast