Curated: 25 things from 25

Keywords of the year: community projects, collaboration & discipline

Playground readers,

With less than two weeks left until the new year, and after all the love for 23 from 23 and 24 from 24 – here comes 25 from 25: insights, learnings, personal notes, and a few failures from the year.

Looking back at everything that happened, a few keywords came to my mind: community and co-creation projects, exhibitions, creative concepts, smart planning and strategy, and blank space for new opportunities. I’m ending the year proud, and genuinely impressed by everyone who wanted to collaborate with us, and by those who shared that they learned something after reading this newsletter. I’ve also loved hearing success stories from the clients we work with.

This year felt like a leap, and I’m curious to see where 2026 takes studio playground. I feel really excited. But before we make that leap, here are 25 things from 25 – somewhat grouped into five areas.

Community and co-creation projects

1. The energy around Playground Magazine – this is the single biggest community project we run twice a year, bringing more than 100 creatives from all around Europe together. This year, we made two issues, hosted four events to celebrate them, and published fantastic ideas. The way the magazine gives the energy back is incredible – I love every bit of it. This year, I promised myself it’s not about making at least 10 issues (the promise I made to myself when starting). It’s about continuing to do it for many, many years to come – and there are so many exciting ideas planned for next year.

   

   A nice memory from November in London – my partner accidentally took a photo of me, just after I’d finished reading the final proof of Playground Issue 4 before we sent it to print. Here’s to more joys in the process in 2026.

2. Notebook inspired by community notes – we launched this just over a month ago, and it still feels like a dream project. We got the chance to collaborate with designer Julie Joliat – someone we’ve loved for a long time – and to involve you, our community, who submitted over 120 images of your inner notebook pages. Enjoy the play-outs, because thinking or playing doesn’t have to start from an empty page, and this notebook will challenge you in new ways.

3. Exhibitions – from Stockholm Design Week to 3daydofdesign, and into new concepts for next year, this remains one of the most creative parts of what we do for our clients – creating, curating, managing & bringing a lot of people together.

4. Creating more exciting community initiatives is at the top of our agenda, so we’re expanding our mission with other brands we love. You can now print a newspaper for free through our new Playground x Newspaper Club Open Call!

   Your concept can be anything: a creative manifesto, a visual portfolio, your small business presentation, a zine dedicated to your granny’s 80th birthday, or even a collaboration you’ve been dreaming of. Bring us your most fun and playful ideas. Apply here.

5. Meeting people IRL, thanks to partners. The latest Berlin event was so great, and these gatherings only happen when we’re invited to stay in comfortable places. In Berlin, we had a brilliant chance to stay at STAYERY apartments – you can work, there’s a self-served Späti downstairs, and the rooms were super cosy and full of charm.

   We even got you a discount code: if you’re planning a trip to Berlin, head over to their site and use PLAYGROUND10 for a 10% discount (valid until 28-02-2026).

Smart Strategy & Curation

6. Repetition: re-listening, re-reading, re-watching – not for surprise, but for depth.
   I find revisiting something I’ve already consumed not only comforting, but also surprisingly revealing – it helps me notice more, find depth, and get closer to the thinking behind the words. It’s taught me to spot details I didn’t catch the first time.

7. Start on paper, always. Decks are a beautiful way to show strategy, but truthfully, it’s the content that matters. If your strategy is exciting when written out on an A4 sheet, it will only get better from there.

8. Goals > content > platform.
   Goals should sit above your content and your platform. Case in point, our goal with the newsletter is to reach the right people and engage them with an interesting content in their inbox. Substack is simply the send-out platform for us – with the added value of keeping the archive in one place. I like that you can comment (and when times are calmer, I do that too), but you don’t need to obsess over the platform.

9. Perspectives. I still believe that in order for strategy to work, you need to learn how to bring more people to understand it. I wrote the whole post around it.

10. Everything is research – you just have to learn how to carry ideas through. It’s an incredible privilege to do the kind of work we do, but to do it well, you have to follow the work all the way through. The best ideas often land when you’re furthest away from work. Keeping notes, staying curious, and learning not to over-consume what comes your way really matters.

Way of working & being

11. We shouldn’t fear AI – we should fear people and businesses that track success only through efficiency. Why do we complain about AI taking over, and yet keep killing the things we love? The amount of love I’ve seen online for receiving a physical letter this season has been huge. At the same time, the news arrived that Denmark’s national postal service, PostNord, will stop delivering letters – with its final letter delivery planned for the end of 2025. Can you imagine a world without post? Send more letters, show it still matters! postnord.dk+1

credit: @anetaurbonaite & @ilemartini

12. Flow state – running, swimming, cooking. I’ve been chasing, and will continue chasing, the things that get me into flow: kind of addictive, meditative, and truly special.

13. Planning papers. At some point this year, I abandoned my planner. It felt heavy, mentally and physically, to carry the whole year around. So I started writing my top list on a single piece of paper, and using tiny paper planners (like the ones I love – or similar weekly versions I grab in stationery stores) for daily or weekly to-do lists. Things have been flowing since. It’s a bit harder to archive, but it’s incredibly satisfying to throw them out daily or weekly once the day is done.

14. Discipline – a boring one, but nothing happens without it (the tip above helps make it happen).

15. Patience.

Partnerships & collaborations

16. Most great business development happens offline.

17. It’s cool to be the one who initiates. (84% of respondents in our Issue four study said they are actively looking to connect with others through their work – don’t be shy, reach out.)

18. It all starts with a conversation – but it can take 50 of them with the same people, or team, before something really happens.

19. You can’t go far alone. Embrace lifting each other up and collaborating – just like Charli XCX bringing Lorde on stage, and handing over the ‘summer’ during her Coachella set.

20. You’ve got to have great people around you. Stop listening to those who say the world doesn’t need more “things” or “design”. It’s a sad, limiting belief, often reinforced by gatekeepers. If you don’t start, you won’t make great things – you won’t make anything at all. Change only happens by doing. If you start, you do. You learn. You improve. You make better ideas, solutions, and projects. So it’s not about more, it’s about better, through doing.

Failures

21. Failed play experiment – I made it public, and then failed. About 50 days in, I stopped my daily play. If I learned one thing from this project, it’s that it’s important to do something you kind of suck at. With time, you’ll either improve or ditch it – but by playing and experimenting, you get closer to be patient with yourself, and with who you are. Looking back, the experiment probably needed clearer rules and constraints to be successful. I might try a new one next year.

22. Overplanning – leaving no space for unexpected things to happen. I’m already actioning this, and trying to keep 10% of space for the unexpected.

23. The money issue – I’m not sure what happened this year, but quite a few invoices had to be chased (and some still are). Dear clients who pay: we love you. Still, I’ve heard from more or less everyone we spoke to that they’re dealing with unpaid invoices too – and it can really throw a business off course. I was journalling angrily about it one day when a thought landed: maybe we should make a special Playground “The Money Issue”. It seems like a real problem in the creative industries, something Davy Denduyver also wrote about in Playground Issue 4.

24. Shipments – not a failure, per se, but something we overlooked. The team is now properly taking care of it. Bottom line: creating products creates logistics – boxes, returns, and lost parcels. We didn’t address this well enough this year, and we’ll find better solutions next year.

Final extra

25. Bonus end-of-year curated tip: watch The New Yorker at 100 on Netflix – I loved it, and it’s full of inspiration, editorially and business-wise.

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What to expect in 2026 from us? Cooking fun things.. new products, big collaborations, presence across multiple Nordic capitals, and more. I’ll manifest here that our 26 of 26 is filled with data visuals too!

This newsletter is dedicated to all people around me, our team, their partners and friends, and all our collaborators, clients, you readers – it takes a village to create great projects and businesses, and I’m incredibly grateful for the people around making great work together.

Thank you for reading Playground! It means a lot.

Happy holidays, and here’s to the start of 2026,

Auste