The Anatomy of Creativity — Mitra Shahsavand on Designing Through Crisis

There is a particular kind of courage in sitting down to create when your world is quietly falling apart. For Mitra Shahsavand — brand designer, communication strategist, and one of the most thoughtful voices in Iranian brand identity — that courage was not chosen; it was demanded. And what she built in the ruins of a prolonged crisis turned out to be among the most meaningful work of her career.

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Mitra enters a deeply personal and intellectually rich conversation about what creativity really looks like under pressure — and what it reveals about the human mind.

Between Two Crises

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Mitra was already living inside another kind of emergency: her mother’s illness. A slow, devastating, chronic crisis that would stretch across nearly four years — through lockdowns, remote teams, and the relentless rhythm of care.

She built her studio remotely during those years, growing a team of fourteen people — some of whom she never once met in person. Meanwhile, at home, she was making hourly decisions about a woman she loved beyond all measure: her mother. What happens to the creative mind when survival crowds out everything else? Mitra went looking for the answer — not only in her own experience, but in neuroscience.

The Three Networks

At the heart of this episode is one of the most fascinating explanations of the creative process you will hear in Persian media.

Mitra introduces us to the three brain networks that govern creativity: the Default Mode Network (the storyteller — restless, imaginative, dream-spinning), the Executive Control Network (the controller — logical, censoring, precise), and the Salience Network (the selector — the curator between chaos and order). She describes how, in times of chronic crisis, the logical brain partially retreats, and the creative network quietly surges forward — not as a gift, but as a survival mechanism. “The brain,” she says, “has a pre-programmed rescue app.”

This is why, she explains, she could sit at her computer with tears running down her face, move the mouse, and still do her best work.

MyLady, MyBaby, and the Education of Empathy

During those years of crisis, Mitra was simultaneously designing two of her most celebrated brand projects: MyLady — a brand about women — and MyBaby — a diaper brand that required her to learn, from the inside, what motherhood means.

Having never been a mother herself, she approached the work the way an actor approaches a role: through research, immersion, and radical empathy. She studied neuroscience documentaries about pregnancy and birth. She listened to focus groups. She learned the precise distance between a newborn’s eyes and its mother’s face during breastfeeding — twenty centimeters, the exact range of a newborn’s vision. She traced the hormonal architecture of maternal love.

And all the while, her own mother no longer recognized her face.

“She tells her nurse, ‘This lady is such a good lady,'” Mitra says quietly. “But she doesn’t know I’m her daughter.”

Rules for the Unbearable

One of the episode’s most striking passages is Mitra’s account of the rules she made for herself in order to survive her mother’s care — and to survive it with dignity.

She describes refusing to let her mother be gavaged against her will. She describes signing documents forbidding resuscitation. She describes moving the ICU into their home so her mother could stay in a familiar, loving space. “Anything that made my mother’s life easier was okay,” she says. “Anything that caused her pain was not.”

These decisions — made with full knowledge and complete love — illuminate what it means to truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes: not as an intellectual exercise, but as an act of devotion.

Creativity as a Muscle

Mitra is clear: creativity is not a talent you either have or don’t. It is a muscle. It responds to use. It strengthens with practice. It can be trained, exercised, and developed.

She traces her own arc — from the designer who had to lock herself in a hotel room by the Caspian Sea for two days before an idea would come, to the designer who now walks into a client meeting and immediately knows what she wants to do. What changed? Years of practice, yes — but also years of deep self-inquiry, through a healing methodology she discovered during the peak of crisis, working with a guide who helped her access what her logical brain had long suppressed.

“Self-awareness helps creativity,” she says. “And creativity helps self-awareness.”

The Intuition Question

The conversation takes a genuinely philosophical turn when Mitra and Hossein explore the tension between the scientific and intuitive explanations of creative inspiration. Is an idea the product of neural networks firing? Or is it, as Elizabeth Gilbert and Steven Pressfield suggest in their own ways, something received — something floating in the air, looking for a vessel?

Mitra refuses to take a firm side. She describes near-death experiences that science still cannot explain. She wonders where the Default Mode Network gets its raw material. She holds her uncertainty with curiosity rather than anxiety. “I love being a curious observer of all of it,” she says.

The AI Question

Near the end, the conversation turns to artificial intelligence — and Mitra’s answer is one of the most honest in the episode. She uses AI as a tool. She has asked it to write in the style of Arundhati Roy. She finds it useful. But the idea of handing creative leadership over to agents — even agents trained exclusively on her own work — makes her, she admits quietly, sad.

“We need human-to-human interaction. We have a vibe for each other. It doesn’t have that vibe.”

She is not against the future. She is simply unwilling to let it arrive without asking what it costs.

A Conversation Dedicated to One Person

When Hossein asks Mitra who she would like to dedicate this conversation to, she does not hesitate.

Her mother.

“She played a big role in the path I’ve taken. I discovered so many things with her — both when she was healthy and when she was sick. Even when she wasn’t fully aware, she helped me discover a lot.”

In that dedication lies the quiet center of the entire episode: that the most transformative creative work does not happen in spite of love and loss — it happens through them.