An Innovation
& Experience Design Studio

We translate shifts in how we work, live, and play into new experiences, services, and products that are as useful as they are unexpected. Our playground is everyday life, culture, and place.

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The Work

We develop original ideas that make everyday life more meaningful, imaginative, and alive.

We’re dreaming up thoughtful moments, experiences, products, services, and ventures as invitations to slow down, engage intentionally, and connect more deeply.

We hold every idea to the same standard. Is it genuinely meaningful? Does it make life more interesting, joyful, or beautiful? Does it push boundaries? Does it shift something in the person who encounters it?

We’re guided by a sense of adventure and curiosity for what’s humanly possible. Sometimes we release our own ideas into the wild. Other times we partner selectively to do things differently.

Client Work

We partner with founders, lifestyle brands, and organizations to develop new experiences and offerings, from an emerging opportunity through a tangible concept and, where appropriate, into production.

We explore people, culture, and context to uncover meaningful opportunities and define where to act.
We turn promising opportunities into developed concepts, experiences, prototypes, and clear paths forward.
We assemble the right collaborators and lead the creative direction and production needed to bring an idea to life.

Each engagement brings together the perspectives and creative collaborators the idea calls for.

Independent Work

Alongside client work, we develop original projects and ventures of our own, following promising ideas wherever they lead.

Selected Experiences

Original inquiries brought to life through experience, conversation, and play.

STYLE & IDENTITY

The Becoming Sessions ™

A play lab, salon, and participatory exploration of personal style, identity, and becoming.

What if personal style became a pathway to self-knowledge, creativity, and authentic expression?

Bureau of Play designed a modular four-act program connecting reflection, creative practice, craft, and embodied expression. Two acts were piloted in Brooklyn alongside an original reflection tool and a wider collaboration model.

Program Strategy · Experience Design · Tool Prototyping

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SPACE & CULTURE

A salon-style panel and inquiry into the relationship between space, atmosphere, and human agency.

The Rooms We Inhabit ™

How do the spaces we inhabit shape who we are, and how might we more consciously shape them in return?

Bureau of Play designed and produced an intimate salon-panel bringing together practitioners across architecture, spatial design, and hospitality. The conversation explored how space sets tone, the elements that work together to produce atmosphere, and the agency people have to shape the environments they inhabit.

Cultural Research · Editorial Framing · Experience Design

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Founded by Sasha

Sasha (Charlemagne) Nakane is an innovation strategist, researcher, experience designer, and producer working at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and culture.

Her two decades of experience span innovation consulting at Salesforce Ignite, building new media initiatives, creative production for Amazon, HBO, Disney, Viacom, and Toca Boca, and teaching strategic design at Parsons, CCA, and SVA.

Working across disciplines has shaped an integrative approach that bridges business and imagination, structure and story, insight and intuition.

She founded Bureau of Play to imagine new possibilities for how we live, work, and play—and bring them to life through research, strategy, storytelling, and experience design. Through the studio, she brings together multidisciplinary collaborators to develop original experiences, services, and products.

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Approach

Curiosity is our practice.
Atypical is our DNA.

We follow the idea across questions, disciplines, perspectives, and people. Through research, experimentation, and collaboration, we find the form each idea calls for.

Sometimes that form is an experience. Sometimes it is a service, product, program, or venture. Sometimes it is something that does not have a name yet.

Have an emerging opportunity, an unusual idea, or a question worth following? Start a conversation.

Let's Play

An Innovation & Experience Design Studio