"Hello world!" -Creative Disobedience Collective
Refusing the Default Settings
In January, I finished a two-year MFA in Graphic Design. It was intense in all the right ways and a few of the wrong ones. It sharpened my thinking, wrecked my sleep schedule, and introduced me to a truly unsustainable Red Bull habit. It also pushed my teaching practice further than I expected, which was honestly the whole point.
As part of my thesis, I created the Creative Disobedience Collective. And now I’m here, on Substack, which means it’s officially real and I have to keep going.
The Collective grew out of questions I’ve been sitting with for years, but grad school turned the volume all the way up. Questions about burnout and why creative fields treat it like a personality trait. Questions about critique and whether it actually builds designers or just conditions them to absorb feedback quietly and perform confidence they don’t feel. Questions about identity and whether we’re expected to check who we are at the door before we start designing, teaching, or leading. Questions about what we inherit in design education and why we almost never stop to look at it.
Grad school didn’t create those questions. It just made them impossible to ignore.
Creative Disobedience is not about being contrarian for sport. It’s about thoughtful resistance. It’s about noticing the defaults we’ve all just... accepted. The ones that tell us exhaustion equals dedication, detachment equals professionalism, and rigor has to come at the expense of care. It asks who built the systems we’re operating inside, who benefits from them, and what actually happens if we decide to adjust them instead of assuming they’re fixed.
The Collective started as research. I interviewed designers and educators. I mapped emotional labor in creative classrooms. I rewrote chunks of my curriculum, especially in design history and critique. I tested new frameworks. Some worked immediately. Some needed revision. Some failed in ways that were genuinely useful. The process itself kept becoming the point.
What became clear pretty quickly is that this work can’t just live inside a thesis document nobody reads. It needs conversation. It needs collaboration. It needs friction. It needs people who are also quietly (or loudly) asking the same things.
My hope is to build a network of designers, educators, and community members who are willing to question what we’ve normalized and experiment with alternatives. I care about sustainable creative practice. Humane critique structures. Honest and expanded design histories. Teaching that doesn’t require you to pretend you’re a machine. Systems that recognize that designers are whole people, not production units.
The Collective is intentionally flexible. It can look like workshops, shared syllabi, collaborative research, publications, classroom exchanges, community projects, or just good conversations. It’s less about forming an organization and more about forming a practice. A shared willingness to look at the defaults and decide, consciously, whether they still serve us.
If you’re rethinking your classroom, questioning industry expectations, trying to figure out how to keep making work without burning yourself down to do it, or just wondering if there’s a version of this field that doesn’t require you to fragment yourself to participate in it, I’d genuinely love to talk. If you’re interested in collaborating on research, workshops, writing, or experimental learning spaces, I’m open.
One small thing: I'm building out a series of publications through the Collective, and I'm funding them the scrappy way, through merch. If you want to grab a shirt or hat and help get the books made, I would genuinely appreciate it. Also you'd look cool. That part matters too.
You can reach me at katrina@creativedisob.com
Instagram: @creative.disobedience
This is ongoing work. It will evolve. It should. Otherwise we’re just reinstalling the same operating system and calling it a software update.