About
Think in decades. Build in weeks.
Press Play Futures is a futures studio: an innovation lab + a foresight practice + a creative agency in one. Our passion is bold, exciting visions, and using play to uncover inspiring futures and how to bring them to life. We fix how a business operates by understanding its current processes and feedback loops, then helping clarify what the company is growing into.
Where This Started
A futurist & a small business, building the thing we wished existed.
The same gap kept turning up, at every scale.
Mark spent fifteen years inside a Fortune 100 innovation function and a decade as an independent futurist, reading patterns and building the solutions for where companies, departments, and whole industries were heading next. The work was always the same shape: see the pattern early, then build something that could actually get there.
Limatus Bespoke was that problem in miniature. Two decades of real craft, real customers, and a high-touch experience at every step, running on a fractured internal process. Five separate software systems held the business together, and seeing what was actually happening across operations took manual work every single time. The client experience was seamless. The machinery behind it wasn’t.
You don’t fix a fractured process from the outside. Systems evolve by partnering with the people who actually do the work, because they’re the ones who know where the current process breaks. Most of the Limatus build happened alongside Tessa Dee, who runs operations day to day: the exceptions, the judgment calls, the rules nobody had ever written down.
So we built Limatus its own operating system, one that encoded how the business genuinely worked and was structured for the AI era from day one. Once we’d seen the pattern twice, we noticed how many businesses were sitting in exactly the same place.
Read the Limatus case studyWhat We Believe
Three things that shape everything we build.
There is no one monolithic future happening to us
Futures work is about agency, not prediction. There are patterns at play, and we read them closely. But the future is created by those who act. It’s about being brave enough to dream and disciplined enough to bring it to life through consistent action.
Most software asks the business to change shape
You bend your process to fit the tool, then hire people to manage the gap. We think it runs the other way: the system should be shaped around how the work actually happens, and around where it’s headed.
You can’t build toward a decade on a business that lives in someone’s head
Getting a business out of memory and into a system is the unglamorous work that makes everything after it possible. It’s also the first honest look most owners get at where they actually are.
How We Work
From signals, to artifacts, to action.
It’s our tagline, but it’s really just the order we do things in.
SIGNALS
We start by reading where things are going
Foresight is the part most studios skip. Before we build anything, we work out what’s changing in your industry and what it means for the decisions in front of you, so we’re building for the company you’re becoming, not the one you were.
ARTIFACTS
Then we make it something you can touch
Strategy that stays in a slide deck doesn’t change anything. So we turn it into artifacts: a prototype you can click, a system your team logs into on Monday, an installation you can walk through.
ACTION
So it becomes something you actually do
Every engagement ends the same way: a small number of concrete decisions, and a system that supports them. Not a report. Something running.
How Clients Grow With Us
It starts with a Blueprint. It doesn’t have to stop there.
Each step earns the next. Most clients start at the first one. The ones who keep going are the companies we’re building this studio for.
01
The Blueprint
About two weeks
Your business written down, a prototype you can click, and a fixed quote for the build. It’s where every engagement starts, because you can’t plan a decade for a company nobody has mapped.
02
The Business OS
Weeks, then years
One platform built around how the work actually happens, and architected for where the business is going. This is the work that solves today.
03
A futurist on the team
Fractional, embedded
A futurist inside the company, part-time and long-term. Reading signals in your industry, turning them into decisions this quarter, and teaching the leadership team to think in decades and act in days.
04
Future artifacts
Installations and experiences
Where futures work meets art. Experiences that let a team, a board, or a whole audience step into the roadmap and feel what the company is growing into, instead of reading about it.
Who We Work With
Leaders who’d rather design for what’s coming than react to it.
Owner-run businesses
Ready to move from scattered tools and memory to one system built for the next chapter. Most engagements start here.
Leadership teams
Who want a futurist in the room, helping them see the next decade clearly enough to act on it this quarter.
Organizations, conferences, and institutions
That need people to feel a future, not read about it. Installations, exhibits, and experiences built from real foresight work.
Where Press Play Is Going
A studio of futurists and artists, embedded in the organizations they help.
One futurist can help a company see its next decade. A team of them, working alongside artists and builders, can help a whole organization feel it and start moving. That’s the studio we’re building: people who read signals for a living, turn them into things you can touch, and stay in the room until something changes.
If that’s the kind of work you want to do, or the kind of team you want inside your company, we’d like to hear from you.
The Founder
Between poetry and patents.
Futurist & Founder
Mark Warnick
Futurist, inventor, and systems builder. Fifteen years leading innovation inside a Fortune 100 financial company — where the job was reading where things were heading and building the internal foresight function to get there — followed by a decade of independent futures work as 3vies: part magazine, part manifesto, part mirror.
There’s no one monolithic future we’re all marching toward. It’s about understanding the elements at play, then deciding what you want to build. Once you have a clear vision, it becomes the foundation for your decision-making.
The hard part of the future isn’t predicting it. It’s building and refining the systems that can evolve an organization into what it needs to become to realize that vision. That’s the same problem at a Fortune 100 and at a twelve-person shop, and the second one is where almost nobody is doing the work.
- 46 U.S. patents in next-generation interactions See the full list
- 15 years leading innovation inside a Fortune 100 financial company
- Built that company’s internal strategic foresight function
- IFTF Experiential Futures Certificate
- Founded 3vies in 2015 — annual print magazine, workshops, and keynotes
FROM SIGNALS
TO ARTIFACTS
TO ACTION.
PRESS PLAY FUTURESTell us what you're working on. We'll tell you what we'd build.
hello@pressplayfutures.com