Through low-pressure experimentation, Design Play helps people reconnect with their intuition, curiosity, and creative voice. People trust their thinking again.
What it’s for
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Unlocking participation
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Building confidence and creating a shared language
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Supporting new leaders and enabling their development
Best format
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Human Skills Lab
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culture
When people hesitate to contribute, decide, or lead creatively, they lack confidence in their perspective. This shows up as overthinking, silence, or safe decisions.
Design Play™ is Garage Stories proprietary methodology.
It is a future-driven, experimentation-based approach to innovation that builds engagement, shifts mindsets, and improves decision-making under uncertainty and in complex human–AI environments.
set the scene
The session opens inside a story told from the future. Roles, team names and a few simple rules replace the usual meeting format, so people show up with a licence to imagine instead of a position to defend.
This is what moves the room out of performance mode and into exploration — before anyone is asked for an idea.
play
Teams work in fast rounds of research and idea generation. Constraints and game mechanics keep judgment suspended and output high, so the obvious answers get spent early and the room has to reach further.
What comes up here is meant to be rough: curiosities, half-formed fragments, and the tensions worth chasing.
make believe
Ideas become objects — a prototype, a pitch, a product from the future — with AI compressing weeks of production into hours.
Making is how the thinking happens. Putting an idea on the table externalizes it, so the group can question it, change it, and agree on what it actually means.
Share
The session closes with every contribution presented and read back to the room. Nothing is left in a notebook to be written up later.
Teams leave having made sense of what they built — meaning extracted, implications named, a clear call on what's worth carrying forward — and with proof of what the room can produce together.
In neuroscience and psychology, PLAY is a learning state — not entertainment. Design Play brings that into real work: a safe space, a shared lanjuage and repeatable tools teams can apply in any context.
USE CASES
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Design Play builds confidence and trust while strengthening creative direction and questioning skills so teams can interact with AI as collaborators — not as answer machines. AI becomes a tool for exploration, not pressure.
What it’s for
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Reducing anxiety around AI
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Improving prompt quality through clearer thinking
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Helping teams direct AI instead of reacting to it
Best format
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Human Skills Lab
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FUTURES PLAY & Speculative Playground
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ai adoption
Teams are overwhelmed by AI tools but unclear on how to use them meaningfully. Friction appears between humans, processes, and technology.
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Design Play creates space to disrupt habitual thinking, surface real tensions, and explore possibilities through structured play — before decisions are made. Teams stop debating opinions and start seeing the problem together.
What it’s for
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Reframing strategy questions
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Identifying what actually matters now
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Aligning on direction before execution
Best format
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FUTURES PLAY & Speculative Playgrounds
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Strategic Architecture
strategy
Teams feel stuck between too many options, inherited assumptions, or recycled strategy language. Traditional offsites jump too fast to solutions or slides.
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Design Play creates a shared experience for companies and their clients to explore shared challenges and future directions together. Through structured play, real needs and tensions surface — before products, roadmaps, or partnerships are decided.
What it’s for
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Identifying new growth and expansion opportunities
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Strengthening strategic client relationships
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Co-creating future partnership directions
Best format
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FUTURES Play & Speculative Playgrounds
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clients
Teams rely on meetings, decks, or account feedback to understand what their clients actually need. Strategic conversations stay polite, transactional, or stuck in short-term priorities.
TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
Each tool is designed to engineer specific cognitive, emotional, and social conditions that make exploration, sense-making, and better decisions under uncertainty possible.
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Imagination Layer
01. Futures PLAY & Speculative Playgrounds
Teams step into alternative futures through hands-on, IRL speculative environments. Instead of talking about the future, participants interact with it through artifacts, scenarios, roles, and unfinished concepts.
Empathy Layer
02. Human Innovation Skills Lab
Teams work through short, focused creative challenges designed around core innovation skills such as empathy, curiosity, creative confidence, sense-making, and decision-making under uncertainty.
COLLECTIVE
INDIVIDUAL
Meaning Layer
03. Storytelling & Narrative Prototyping
Teams use storytelling and content creation as part of the innovation process.
They build rough future narratives, metaphors, concept stories, and speculative content instead of slides or strategy decks.
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Behaviour Layer
04. Environmental Experiments
Teams work inside deliberately designed physical or social environments that change how people interact, think, and behave. By shifting context, roles and spatial dynamics, hidden tensions and power structures become visible.
SCIENCE BEHIND IT
98%
2%
Share of people scoring at “creative genius” level: age five vs adulthood.
(George Land & Beth Jarman, NASA-designed longitudinal study, 1,600 subjects.)
People don't stop having ideas. They stop sharing them. When new ideas carry personal risk and proven ones carry none, teams play it safe and repeat what worked before. Change the conditions and the ideas return. The cost appears in three areas organisations already measure.
3.5x
INNOVATION
$8.8T
60%
EFFICIENCY
Companies that foster creativity outperform peers in revenue growth.
Annual cost of disengaged employees — 9% of global GDP.
Of the workday goes to coordination and rework, not skilled creative work.
Share of people scoring at “creative genius” level: age five vs adulthood.
SATISFACTION
SATISFACTION
PRICING AND PACKETS
Explore the different packets and pricing we offer for corporates.
HUMAN SKILLS LAB
Best Use Cases: Culture · AI Adoption
Monthly Design Play™ challenges that build core innovation skills — curiosity, empathy, reframing, sense making, and creative confidence.
Modes
Default themes
Such as curiosity, empathy, reframing, sense making.
Starting at 5 eur/ employee/mo for
Customized themes
Ad-hoc and aligned to your culture, strategy, or business priorities
Add-ons
• Gamification layer
• Live sessions
• In-person final event
Starting at 8eur/ employee/ month for 250 people.
futures play
Best Use Cases: Strategy · Clients
A guided Design Play™ lab where teams explore possible futures, surface hidden assumptions, and reframe strategic questions through speculative design and making.
Modes
Leadership Strategy Mode
Closed, high-stakes future sensemaking for leadership and strategy teams. Used to reframe real strategic or product questions, and explore future risks and opportunity spaces before decisions are locked in.
Client & Network Experience Mode
A lighter, social Design Play™ experience for clients, partners, and communities. Used to make the future tangible and spark conversation. Designed as a future-oriented alternative to panels, talks, or cocktail events.
Price based on scope, team size, and customization.
strategic architecture
Placemaking for organizations
Strategic partnership to design the organizational conditions for innovation, future readiness, and human–AI collaboration. This is organizational placemaking for how an organization imagines, decides, and evolves into the future.
Modes
1) DISRUPT — Strategic Diagnosis
Surface dominant mental models, and structural tensions.
2) EXPLORE — Future Sense making
Future pressures, uncertainties, and alternative scenarios.
3) SHAPE — Strategic Architecture Design
Organization’s innovation, decision-making, cultural, and human–AI collaboration architecture.
4) APPLY — Activation & Evolution
Embed new protocols, cutlure and sense making practices.
Price based on scope, team size, and customization.
CLIENTS & PARTNERS
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