Conference + Workshop Series

ARMED
FOR THE
FUTURE.

Year2023 ClientArm EventGlobal Graduate Conference ThemePowering Innovation
Creative Lead Art Director Copywriter Workshop Facilitator
Armed for the Future — Arm Global Graduate Conference 2023

The Challenge

Two workshops.
Brightest minds
in tech.

Arm wanted two distinct, engaging and challenging workshops for their graduates. They had to be fun, differentiated in terms of ability and neurodiversity, and embed the company culture of creativity, teamwork and leadership — all while linking to the conference theme, Powering Innovation.

Arm is full of some of the brightest minds in tech. For their annual Global Graduate Conference, we were challenged to create a set of fun workshops that would push teams intellectually and creatively, while being conscious of a high percentage of neurodiverse attendees, and making sure Arm's cultural values landed.

The Solution

Different
games,
same lesson.

Two workshops, two completely different surfaces, one shared pursuit — how do you handle yourself when the variables keep moving?

Build the Future leaned into making: a scrapyard city challenge where teams turned Lego, electronics and imagination into functioning monorails, lifts and post-apocalyptic neighbourhoods.

Power Your Journey leaned into pressure: rockets to the Mun in Kerbal Space Program while someone else on the team was defusing bombs in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Different games. Same lesson about how you show up when things get hard.

Workshop 01

Build the Future.

Build the Future — teams building the marble run together
01
Scrapyard city of tomorrow.
Lego Electronics Craft materials Narrative design
A scrapyard challenge to build the city of the future out of crafty materials, Lego, electronics and imagination — with the stories inside the city doing as much work as the build itself. It was a resounding success featuring functioning monorails, lifts and post-apocalyptic tales.
The point Progress isn't the brief. The city you build is only as good as the story people choose to live inside it. Engineering with meaning beats engineering without.
Build the Future — teams in action Build the Future — building Build the Future — creation

Workshop 02

Power Your Journey.

Power Your Journey — teams at work
02
Rocket to the Mun. Bombs on the table.
Kerbal Space Program Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes Role-split teams Time pressure
A time-pressured space challenge in Kerbal Space Program — teams had to design and build a working rocket and pilot it to the Mun inside the clock. Every team member had a different role, different responsibilities, different skills. And while all of that was happening, they were also trying to defuse bombs using Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Designed to test a team's ability to handle failure, pressure, team dynamics, communication and resilience — and to reward the teams who stopped optimising for the destination.
The point Some teams landed on the Mun. Most didn't. Everyone still walked out having learned the same thing — the takeaway was about how you handled the journey, not getting to the destination at any cost.
Power Your Journey — team at screens Power Your Journey — in session Power Your Journey — team communication

Why it worked

Built for
every brain in the room.

The two workshops were deliberately different surfaces — making vs. pressure, freeform vs. constrained, story-led vs. systems-led. That split meant every kind of thinker got a place to shine.

Neurodiverse attendees weren't designed around as an afterthought; they were part of the core design logic. Role-split teams, multiple entry points, and failure built into the format — the whole thing was structured so that no single way of thinking was "the right one."

The thread running through both: resilience. Not the gritty, grind-it-out version. The emotional, team-level version — how do you keep communicating when the rocket's on fire and the bomb timer's ticking and someone's still trying to explain the instructions?

That's Powering Innovation — not as a slogan pinned to a backdrop, but as something the grads actually did, with their hands, under pressure, with their team.

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