Innovation Studio
for Cultural Strategy
& Experience Design

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

Say Hello

The Work

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

We’re dreaming up original, 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. Each engagement brings together the perspectives and creative collaborators the idea calls for.

We explore people, culture, and context to uncover meaningful opportunities and define where to act.
We turn promising opportunities into developed concepts, tangible 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 that invite people to slow down, engage intentionally, and connect more deeply.

Selected Experiments

The Becoming Sessions ™

Program + Experience Prototype

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.

Four-act program · Two live prototypes · Forty participants

Program Strategy · Experience Design · Tool Prototyping

The Rooms We Inhabit ™

Integrity, Cultural Inquiry + Salon Prototype

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 the tone, the elements that work together to produce atmosphere, and the agency people have to shape the environments they inhabit.

Three panelists · Three disciplines · Three thematic lenses · Invited audience

Cultural Research · Editorial Framing · Experience Design

Founded by Sasha

Bureau of Play is led by Sasha (Charlemagne) Nakane, an innovation strategist, researcher, experience designer, and producer whose work moves from early inquiry through concept development and execution.

Her perspective is shaped by two decades across film and television production, innovation consulting, and graduate education. She teaches graduate courses in innovation and strategic design at Parsons and has also taught at California College of the Arts and the School of Visual Arts.

Previous experience includes Salesforce Ignite, creative services and promotional production at Viacom, and production work for Amazon, HBO, Disney, NBCUniversal, and Toca Boca.

At Bureau, Sasha leads research, strategy, and creative development, assembling a distinct constellation of artists, designers, makers, researchers, technologists, and other collaborators around each engagement.

Start a Conversation

Our 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?

Join the Playground

Innovation Studio for Cultural Strategy & Experience Design