A practical rule for not falling in love with your own bad ideas.
Here's a small, unglamorous rule that has saved me more than any burst of inspiration ever has: keep your ideas cheap and rough for as long as you possibly can.
The reason is psychological, not aesthetic. The more polished and expensive an idea becomes, the harder it is to kill — and killing ideas is most of what design actually is. A finished thing argues for its own survival. A rough sketch will let you walk away.
Take the Bob Marley show at Mandalay Bay, where we designed the environment. The obvious first structure — a straight biography, room by room, in order — is the kind of idea that gets comfortable fast: familiar, reasonable, easy to keep building on. Shaping the space to the music rather than the life story was the better call. And the general point holds on any project: the more developed an idea becomes, the more it resists being dropped, whether or not it deserves to survive.
So the rule I take from it isn't about Marley or about Vegas. It's about sequence: decide late, commit hard. Stay in cheap, throwaway form — sketches, cardboard, rough passes — right up until you're genuinely sure, because everything you finish becomes something you have to fight yourself to abandon.
Most people do it backwards. They polish early, fall in love, and then spend the rest of the project defending a decision they made before they understood the problem. Keep it loose, keep it honest, and let the right idea win on merit rather than on how much you've already invested in the wrong one.
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About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award–winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, the Singapore studio he established in 2015. Over more than twenty-five years he has designed immersive experiences, themed attractions, live shows, ceremonies and broadcast environments — including the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies at the Al Wasl dome, Olympic broadcast environments for the Vancouver 2010 and Rio 2016 Games, Las Vegas residencies (Bob Marley Hope Road at Mandalay Bay, 2025), the opening-ceremony shows for IAAPA Expo since 2024, and a continuing partnership with Taman Safari Indonesia on Varuna, Lila and Marine Safari Bali. He gave a keynote, Spaces That Speak, at World Stage Design Sharjah 2025, and is currently writing his first book, on the craft of creativity. — patricklarsen.studio
