Last week, we hosted a group from Aura İstanbul at our Istanbul office for an evening that turned into one of those nights where people keep talking long after they probably should have left. We’d recently finished developing Marwood Deadline, a design game about making interior choices under time pressure, and invited the Aura group to play it with us.
Architecture Meets Furniture Design
The group from Aura İstanbul (İstanbul Mimarlık ve Şehircilik Araştırmaları Akademisi) works in architecture and urban research. We make furniture. Different fields, but it turned out we share a lot of the same frustrations about deadlines and last-minute changes.
How the Design Game Works
The game mechanics are straightforward: pick products, choose configurations, select wall and floor materials, decide on colors, and do it all while the clock counts down. What made the evening interesting wasn’t the game itself but watching how different people approached the same constraints. Some players agonized over every choice, others made quick calls and moved on, a few changed their minds three times in the final seconds.
Real Stories from Real Projects
Between rounds, the conversation kept circling back to real projects. Someone mentioned a client who approved everything, then walked into the finished space and hated the floor color they’d specifically chosen. Another person talked about spending weeks on material specifications only to have the project timeline collapse. These aren’t the stories that go in project presentations, but they’re the ones that get knowing laughs from everyone in the room.
The game gave us a reason to gather, but what made the evening worthwhile was the space it created for actual conversation. Not networking, not pitching, just people who work in related fields talking about the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually do.
By the end of the night, we’d moved beyond the game entirely. People were comparing notes on dealing with last-minute changes, discussing how time pressure affects decision-making, sharing stories about projects that went sideways despite perfect planning.
The best part? Several people asked when we’re doing it again. Apparently making interior design decisions under ridiculous deadlines is more fun than it sounds, especially when you’re doing it with people who’ve lived through their own versions of the same chaos.
