Our guest is Liam Guiritan, a Chicago-based designer and creative coder who grew up being told there were only two career paths worth taking, and chose neither.

In this episode, Liam speaks with host Christian Solorzano about how curiosity became his education — from taking apart his sister's Hello Kitty radio as a kid to teaching himself creative coding tools like p5.js and Processing after graduating from DePaul. He shares how stepping away from institutional structure gave him the freedom to experiment on his own terms, and why he believes real exploration only becomes meaningful when you give it boundaries.

The conversation gets into what craft means when your medium is syntax, how Liam thinks about measuring growth through what he learned rather than what he produced, and why he draws more inspiration from design coming out of South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland than from what's happening closer to home.

Liam also talks about performing live coding at an algorave in Chicago — an event where the code itself is the instrument — and why in an era of infinite digital surfaces, print is the thing giving him the most hope.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.