The solution came in the shower.

Not at the desk. Not in a brainstorm session. Not at two in the morning forcing an answer through exhaustion.

Production designer Patrick Larsen had been working through a specific challenge for the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies for days. Every direction came up short. Then he stopped trying. Went home. And the next morning, the answer was simply there — complete, ready to execute.

Most people call this inspiration. The muse. The creative spark. But for an Emmy Award-winning production designer who has built environments for billions of viewers, this moment was the output of weeks of invisible work, not a random gift.

After twenty years designing everything from 200-seat regional theaters to Olympic broadcast environments, the same creative pattern surfaces on every project. Three phases: gathering material, letting it connect, making it real.

Phase One: Gather More Widely Than Feels Necessary

The input phase is deliberate. Research, reading, noticing, experiencing — some directly relevant to the project, most apparently not. This is not warm-up. This is the primary work of the phase.

Theater taught Patrick Larsen this discipline early. With limited budgets and compressed timelines, you design from what you have already absorbed. A production designer whose references are narrow produces narrow work. One whose intake spans multiple disciplines has unexpected combinations available — and unexpected combinations are where original production design comes from.

For the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies, research included Islamic geometry, Arabic calligraphy, and Emirati architectural history alongside urban theory, crowd psychology, and visual perception. For Singapore’s National Day Parade, the input covered how multicultural visual language functions — how different communities read symbols, how colour carries cultural weight, how national unity can be expressed without erasing specificity. Much of this material never appeared explicitly in the final work. All of it shaped the terrain from which ideas grew.

Phase Two: Protect Time for Not Working

The second phase is primarily subconscious. When direct cognitive effort is applied to a problem, thinking moves in linear paths. When you step away, the brain moves differently through accumulated material — making loose connections that deliberate thinking cannot manufacture. This is where the shower solution comes from.

You cannot manufacture this phase. But you can create conditions that make it more likely: unscheduled time, walks, letting attention move without direction, sitting with contradictions instead of rushing to resolve them. The discomfort of holding two opposing possibilities simultaneously without collapsing toward the obvious answer is productive — not a problem to solve.

Running multiple productions simultaneously in repertory theater taught Patrick Larsen to trust this. Solutions arrive if the input work has been solid. Forcing answers under pressure consistently produces thinner work than tolerating uncertainty a little longer.

Phase Three: Execute With Discipline

The third phase is execution. Taking what surfaced and giving it physical form.

For a production designer, craft is decisive here. Gathering and reflection mean nothing without the skill to translate ideas into material decisions — scale, colour, texture, spatial relationships. This is commitment: hundreds of specific decisions, each either sharpening the idea or diluting it.

The essential discipline of execution is subtraction. Early versions always contain excess. Elements that were generative during thinking often do not belong in the finished work. Good production design removes until only what genuinely strengthens the whole remains.

At the scale of Expo 2020 Dubai, coordinating over 400 professionals from 56 countries required one clear creative frame: designing for emotional connection across cultural difference. That sentence gave a lighting director a decision-making framework at two in the morning. ‘Make it impressive’ would have given nothing.

What Two Decades of Production Design Has Confirmed

The three-phase cycle holds regardless of project scale or domain. Large ceremonial productions compress timelines severely. Broadcast design moves fast. Magic residencies require understanding of illusion mechanics. Permanent installations require rigorous execution over years.

Different constraints, different rhythms. The same underlying creative structure.

When you stop approaching creativity as something that either arrives or doesn’t, it becomes something more reliable — a process you can learn, practise, and return to. Not magic. Craft.

About Patrick Larsen

Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award-winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, based in Singapore. Over two decades, he has designed environments for global audiences — from the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies and Olympic broadcast sets to Las Vegas residencies, Broadway-scale theatrical productions, and permanent installations across Asia and the Middle East. Studio Bound takes projects from concept to build with one fully integrated team of designers, concept artists, technical drafters, and production managers. Visit studiobound.sg or read more at patricklarsen.studio

Further reading: How Ideas Actually Happen | Input, Processing, Output: The Creative Cycle That Actually Works