Workshops for creativity and collaboration

We make play

Tailored to your needs, our workshops foster creativity, tackle challenges and drive innovation.

Using our research-backed kit of panels and connectors, we offer workshops to help you develop greater confidence, make deeper connections with colleagues and create space for bold ideas.

A MAPL® workshop is codesigned with you and tailored to your team, your goals and your impact.

Want to spark ideas, improve teamwork, or tackle challenges?

Get in touch to explore how we can work together.

Dieter is a writer and scholar whose work explores how the arts and storytelling can support wellbeing, empathy and reflection.

Dieter Declercq PhD

  • Drawing on a background in philosophy, film, and media, Dieter’s research bridges aesthetics, health, and popular culture — with a special interest in comedy, satire, and mental health.

    Dieter is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow, and the author of Satire, Comedy and Mental Health: Coping with the Limits of Critique (2021) and co-host of the Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health podcast.

    Through teaching, writing, and public engagement, he brings a thoughtful and often playful perspective to the ways creativity helps us care for ourselves and each other.

Ambrose is a designer with a particular interest in the way design - and designers - work to help communities grow.

Ambrose Gillick PhD

Our offer

In one of our workshops, your team will build, craft stories, and stretch their thinking in ways that feel fun, challenging, and productive.

We offer three workshop programmes which are tailored to suit your needs: Communication and Connection, Idea Generation and Project Development.

Each MAPL® workshop supports your people to think differently, through hands-on playful exploration. Your team will unleash their creativity and build stronger connections, enabling them to explore challenges, possibilities and solutions in new ways.

We recommend a minimum of 90 minutes per session, with groups of up to 30 people. We can arrange sessions for larger groups.

Communication and Connection

Interrupt the everyday through design, storytelling, and reflection.

  • This workshop will strengthen your team’s collaboration skills, build creative confidence, and unlock actionable insights.

Idea Generation

Imagine new possibilities.

  • In this workshop, your team will employ lateral thinking to make space for the unexpected, explore fresh perspectives and create bold, original concepts.

Project Development

Prototype, shape, and construct.

  • Your team will work through a challenge step-by-step and structure their ideas into a practical sequence of actions with tangible deliverables.

“The workshops gave us valuable space to pause, think about our work differently, connect more deeply with each other, and problem-solve together in creative new ways.”

Dr Helen Garr, Medical Director of NHS Practitioner Health

What our clients say

“The workshop encouraged us to think differently, get creative and connect in ways we rarely get to in our day-to-day work. It helped break down barriers, spark conversations and gave us fresh insight into each other’s strengths and working styles. Most importantly, it reminded us of the value of collaboration, curiosity, and joy.”

Kerry Barber, Director of Research & Innovation Support, University of Kent

“This was a transformative experience for many of our students, who were lifted out of the confusion and stress of graduate study into a space of direct and playful learning. They were given generous space and time to reflect critically and productively on their experience.”

Amica Dall, Co-Founder of Assemble, Writer and Teacher

“Our MAPL® workshop helped laboratory researchers to tap into their creativity in expression of structured thinking around creativity.”

Renos Savva, Head of Innovation and Venture Development Teacher, Discovery Park

Our story

MAPL® grew out of the meeting of two complementary worlds.

When Dr Dieter Declercq and Dr Ambrose Gillick first met in an online workshop at the University of Kent in 2021, they discovered a shared commitment to turning their academic and creative work toward social good.

Drawing on Ambrose’s experience in participatory architectural projects across Glasgow, and Dieter’s research in the medical humanities, they began to imagine how design, play, and reflection might become tools for empathy, wellbeing, and collective imagination.

  • From its earliest stages, MAPL® was shaped by community-based experimentation. In Northfleet, Kent, Dieter and Ambrose collaborated with local organisations to develop Fail Space — an improvised performance structure built in a community garden. Through facilitated narrative play, participants used the space to share stories and build confidence, later adapting it for their own events, including the Queen’s Jubilee in 2022. The project evolved organically into Play Space, a flexible workshop model used in schools, universities, and neighbourhood settings to explore how making and storytelling can generate care and connection.

    In collaboration with a design manufacturer, this ongoing research took tangible form as MAPL® — a world-building consultancy and toy maker. Grounded in craft and inquiry rather than nostalgia or mass production, MAPL® creates sustainably made timber kits that combine architectural precision with open-ended imagination. Each workshop and kit extends the founders’ belief that building is a way of thinking — that through play, people can construct not just spaces, but new ways of seeing themselves and one another.

Contact us

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We can’t wait to hear from you!