About
A futurist & a small business, building the thing we wished existed.
Press Play Futures is a futures studio — innovation lab, foresight practice, and creative agency in one. Here’s where it came from, what we believe, and how we work.
Where This Started
Problems & Patterns
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. The business was held together by five separate software systems, 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.
But you don’t fix a fractured process from the outside. Systems evolve by partnering with the people who actually do the work — they’re the ones who know where the current process breaks, and what new patterns need to exist for the next version of it to hold. Most of the Limatus build happened alongside Tessa, who runs the business 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, rather than forcing it into someone else’s software.
That’s the studio. Once we’d seen the pattern twice, we started noticing how many businesses were sitting in exactly the same place.
Read the Limatus case study→What We Believe
Three things that shape everything we build.
The future is already here, unevenly distributed
We don’t predict. We read the patterns that are already visible — in technology, in behavior, in how businesses like yours are quietly changing — and work out what they mean for you specifically.
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.
The AI era rewards businesses whose logic is written down
You can’t automate what only exists in someone’s head. Getting a business out of memory and into a system is the unglamorous work that makes everything after it possible.
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, an installation you can walk through, a working system your team logs into on Monday.
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.
In Practice
That shows up as three kinds of work.
Most engagements start with one and grow into another. A workshop becomes a system. A system becomes something we put on a stage.
01 — STRATEGIES
Workshops & advisory
Answering the question every owner is asking — “how do I get my business AI-ready?” — and mapping what opportunities open up in this new era.
02 — SYSTEMS
AI-native systems & platforms
We learn how a business actually runs, then turn that logic into infrastructure — prototypes first, then custom builds architected for the next chapter the company is growing into.
03 — EXPERIENCES
Future artifacts
Installations and immersive exhibits that help organizations feel the future, not just read about it — making visions and roadmaps tangible for cities, conferences, and institutions.
Who We Work With
Leaders who know their current systems won’t carry them into the next decade — and who’d rather design for what’s coming than react to it.
Most of our work is with small businesses ready to move from scattered tools to a single intelligent system. Some of it is with conferences and cultural institutions who need an audience to feel a future rather than read about it.
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.
- 40+ U.S. patents in next-generation interactions
- 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@3vies.com