Workshops that unlock
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 Declercq PhD
Dieter’s research explores how the arts and humanities support health and wellbeing. Through research and collaboration, Dieter focuses on how the arts help us connect, reflect, and make sense of the world.
Ambrose Gillick PhD
Ambrose researches how people shape the places they live, work, and gather. His work explores community-led design, and he collaborates with artists, communities, and researchers to understand how design can support agency and connection.
Play together
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Spark ideas
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Explore freely
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Connect
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Play together 〰️ Spark ideas 〰️ Explore freely 〰️ Connect 〰️
Ready to spark creative confidence?
Get in touch to design a MAPL workshop for your team.
We recommend a minimum of 90 minutes per session, with groups of up to 30 people. We can arrange parallel sessions for larger groups.
Workshops
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 offer three workshop programmes which are tailored to suit your needs: Communication and Connection, Idea Generation, and Project Development. Get in touch to discuss how we can meet your team’s specific goals.
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 Design
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.
What our clients say
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
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
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
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
Making thinking tangible
Hands-on sessions that turn abstract thinking into shared understanding.
Have a question, an idea, or a challenge you'd like to explore together?
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.
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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
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and we will be in touch shortly.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
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