top of page

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

  • Unlocking participation 

  • Building confidence and creating a shared language

  • Supporting new leaders and enabling their development

Best format

  • Human Skills Lab

Hover to see what happens!

Screenshot 2026-01-25 at 17.37.22.png
70739309_725533777860204_3492275131584463610_n.jpg

1

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.

GARAGE STORIES

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.

Screenshot 2026-01-20 at 22.16.20.png
Gray Texture Background
1.png

DISRUPT

The Disrupt phase breaks habitual thinking, inherited assumptions, and default solution patterns.
Teams are exposed to reframed questions, speculative futures, and provocative constraints that interrupt certainty and loosen fixed narratives.

 

People are pushed out of performance mode and into exploration mode.

Untitled design.png

EXPLORE

The Explore phase turns uncertainty into something teams can work with.
Participants interact with future scenarios, speculative artifacts, early concepts, and raw signals from technology, culture, and behavior.

 

Through structured experimentation, teams generate curiosities, fragments, and tensions.

2.png

SHAPE

The Shape phase gives form to what emerged during exploration.
Teams translate signals and tensions into a direction, narrative, opportunity space, or rough prototype.

Making is used as a cognitive tool to externalize thinking, clarify assumptions, and align mental models.

3.png

APPLY

The Reflect phase turns experience into insight and insight into decision.
Teams step back to make sense of what they explored and what actually shifted in their thinking.

They extract meaning, surface implications, and decide what is worth carrying forward.

In neuroscience and psychology, PLAY is a learning state — not entertainment. Design Play applies this principle to help organizations prototype new mindsets, behaviors, and culture by building safe spaces, shared language, and repeatable tools teams can apply in any context.

VALORES

Hover to see what happens!

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

  • Reducing anxiety around AI

  • Improving prompt quality through clearer thinking

  • Helping teams direct AI instead of reacting to it

Best format

  • Human Skills Lab

  • FUTURES PLAY & Speculative Playground

2

ai adoption

Teams are overwhelmed by AI tools but unclear on how to use them meaningfully.  Friction appears between humans, processes, and technology.

ChatGPT Image Jan 25, 2026, 05_46_49 PM.png
52db51_81e5f9fd9c1c4eda9812f18a146dae64~mv2_d_2048_1365_s_2.avif

Hover to see what happens!

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

  • Reframing strategy questions

  • Identifying what actually matters now

  • Aligning on direction before execution

Best format

  • FUTURES PLAY & Speculative Playgrounds

  • 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.

Screenshot 2026-01-24 at 20.22.27.png
Untitled design (2).png

3

Hover to see what happens!

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

  • Identifying new growth and expansion opportunities

  • Strengthening strategic client relationships

  • Co-creating future partnership directions

Best format

  • FUTURES Play & Speculative Playgrounds

4

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.

Team Presenting Data
WhatsApp Image 2025-06-05 at 21.21_edited.jpg

VALORES

Each tool is designed to engineer specific cognitive, emotional, and social conditions that make exploration, sense-making, and better decisions under uncertainty possible.

VALORES

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.

Imagination 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.

VALORES

VALORES

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.

VALORES

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.

VALORES

Most modern work over-activates:

  • Analytical cognition

  • Language-based reasoning

  • Outcome pressure

This creates:

  • Cognitive rigidity

  • Anxiety-driven decision-making

  • Reduced creativity and poor judgment under ambiguity

Design Play is grounded in cognitive science and learning theory. It works by engaging attentional, executive, and expressive brain systems together — restoring cognitive flexibility and reducing anxiety-driven thinking. By creating a low-pressure, exploratory state, Design Play enables clearer judgment, stronger creative direction, and more effective collaboration with tools like AI.

VALORES

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.

Get in touch for a personalized quote 

CLIENTES Y SOCIOS

ARE YOU AN INDIVIDUAL?

Explore Garage Café (currently in Barcelona)
and Play Practice (coming soon) to Spark your Creativity!

GC logo red.png
bottom of page