ADFEST 2025

< TO 3-DAY PROGRAM

Chaos or Kaleidoscope: What is the Future of Human Creativity

Dara Lynch

Kaleidoscope symbolises ever changing and endless possibilities contained in the human experience. Like the kaleidoscope, each one of us has unique patterns and characteristics. In different lights or environments these patterns change and are revealed.

Craft is human. It’s built on skill, intention, and the relentless pursuit of better. AI doesn’t change that—it has the potential to elevate it. AI is the tool that lets us refine, accelerate, and break through boundaries, giving us new materials to shape our ideas at new speeds.

In this talk D&AD will share the findings from recent research that explored creative leaders' perspectives of AI both how it will expand possibilities but also the potential cost of a new future.

Dara Lynch

CEO

D&AD

London

Dara is the current CEO of D&AD having been COO for over 18 years. Dara spent some of her early career working for a famous TV designer and celebrity helping to build his brand and business from nothing to a multi million pound success story including TV and media work, building a thriving and successful product and interior design business, publishing deals and much more. Following the birth of Dara’s twin boys and with then 3 older children under the age of 8, she decided to take a year off to spend time with her 4th and 5th and be a stay at home mum. 12 months in she soon realised that she wanted to do something important whilst remaining in the creative industries. Her life at D&AD was thus borne.

18 years on Dara was coaxed into the CEO role having spent 18 very happy years ‘behind the camera’ as she would say. Dara's passion for D&AD and all things creative has allowed her to have a birds eye view across our industry and is uniquely positioned to understand the changing and challenging landscape across advertising and design and beyond that we find ourselves in.

This is possibly the most exciting time in the history of creativity over the past 60 years. Never has the world been disrupting at the pace and scale as it is today, both geo politically and technologically. With business models transforming rapidly across the industry, Dara would suggest there has never more been a need for human creativity as a dominant and positive force for the future of our industry.