Ideaplatz

Ideaplatz: the road to great design.

It’s time to differentiate your customer experiences in a world where AI sameness is drowning your competitors. A keynote or workshop from Ideaplatz can help galvanize your team in the right direction, back to the human focus you’ll need to stay relevant.

Rediscover the joy of human-centered design again – and how to land your impact. Are you a solo designer, developer, or leader looking for inspiration? Discover past talks, articles, books, and podcasts to get your next breakthrough design insight that’s just a click away in our extensive free resources.

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Design Platzitudes: Cheryl's LinkedIn Newsletter

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Ideaplatz Services

Since 2017, Ideaplatz has been bringing the world's newest ideas to the world's biggest stages - you may not have heard of us, but our ideas have influenced the products you use today. Whether you're looking to hire your next speaker or just browse inspiring design content, we've got you covered.

Opti-Pessimism Keynotes

How did a design framework repeatedly help Ideaplatz founder Cheryl Platz foresee future conditions for the businesses she works with? Opti-Pessimism keynotes combine epic storytelling with real lived experience and business results to leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Conference Talks

Explore future trends like player behavior, prosocial gaming, extended reality, and multimodal user experiences - or explore the differentiators that make great teams thrive - like the art of shared understanding and how design techniques help drive business impact

Discover our Talks

Professional Workshops

Give your team an immersive experience learning about multimodal user experience design -- or using catastrophic imagination for the application of design ethics.

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Books

Ideaplatz founder Cheryl is the author of two bestselling design books: Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Design Experiences and the Kirkus-recommended The Game Development Strategy Guide: Crafting Modern Video Games That Thrive, both published by Rosenfeld Media.

Discover the Books

Start your Learning Journey with Ideaplatz

There are many ways to start learning with Ideaplatz content right now - many available without a paywall. Want more? Contact us at info@ideaplatz.com to inquire about current availability for paid keynote speaking and workshops.

Enduring Play: A Game Dev Podcast

Ideaplatz, LLC is the production company behind the underground hit podcast Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast. Human-crafted by host, game dev, video game professor, and author Cheryl Platz, this limited run series explores how we make video games that don't just survive, but thrive. With 2 seasons and 21 episodes so far, Enduring Play serves as a living companion to the best-selling book The Game Development Strategy Guide - available on all major podcast networks or at enduringplay.com.

Learn and Listen Now

Ideaplatz on Youtube

Catch up with inspiring legacy talks, the latest podcast episodes, shorts, and more at the Ideaplatz YouTube channel.

Watch on YouTube

Ideaplatz Medium Magazine

Catch up with evergreen articles from Cheryl on topics like UX design process and the Opti-Pessimism framework. Top articles from the Design Platzitudes LinkedIn newsletter will also be cross-published here.

Ideaplatz on Medium

The Game Development Strategy Guide

Explore the companion site for Cheryl's second book The Game Development Strategy Guide to see chapter guides for each of the chapters, updates on the book tour, key reviews, podcast show notes, and more.

Visit the Guide site

LATEST FROM THE IDEAPLATZ BLOG

Ideaplatz founder Cheryl Platz to explore “Weird Avatars and Wonky Worlds” at Global Innovation Forum in London this November

October 7, 2026

After a successful year touring with her talk "The Modern Motivators of Play" in support of the launch of The Game Development Strategy Guide a year ago, Cheryl Platz is debuting a new talk...

Listener's Choice Award voting is open September 29 - October 15 for Enduring Play at the Signal Awards.

Enduring Play Podcast named Signal Awards 2026 Finalist in Two Categories

September 29, 2026

BELLEVUE, WA / September 29, 2026: Ideaplatz founder Cheryl Platz launched her first podcast, Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast, as a companion to the launch of her book The Game De...

Cheryl Platz chats video game economics with Carl Cleanthes on the Pixel Retentive Podcast

July 7, 2026

In the latest episode of the long-running creative strategy podcast Pixel Retentive, "Is the Gaming Industry Broken?" Cheryl Platz sits down with host Carl Cleanthes to hit a variety of top...

HEAR FROM OUR PARTICIPANTS

What our participants and audience members say about our content

"Do it! The workshop is fun, engaging, and incredibly useful. Cheryl is an extremely engaging speaker- not one second of the workshop was boring!"

"Thank you Cheryl for putting these sessions together for us. We have gotten a lot of positive feedback from the learnings and we’ll likely be using the frameworks and techniques in a number of our projects to come. "

"Thank you! That was really interesting, entertaining, unexpected, got me thinking. Onwards to the (next) final frontier!"

"The exercises were the best of all other masterclasses I visited because it integrated MURAL. I really liked your lively style of talking. It was very refreshing compared to the other speakers. And the good examples from your experience about how hard certain things were, like thinking about the transitions."

"Having my mind blown by @funnygodmother with her deep understanding of multimodality and models for #interactivity. Her book is now on my reading list. Amazing speaker at our internal #WomeninTeams conference #Boost21"

"Gave us concrete examples of real world items she worked on and they ran into and solved issues and showed us how to think and plan through diagramming a skill using the Mural board. That set up was great!"

Demo Reel

Explore a Decade of Ideaplatz Talks

Ideaplatz founder Cheryl Platz helping audiences foresee the future and cope with the unprecedented present

This 10-year highlight reel weaves together some of sought-after keynote speaker Cheryl Platz’s most compelling points over the years about product design, consumer products, AI, voice user interfaces, video gaming, live streaming, user experience design, user experience research, game design, and design ethics into a single thread and shows how Cheryl has been helping her audiences predict the future of technology trends long before they hit the mainstream. These talks led directly to Cheryl’s two books, Design Beyond Devices and The Game Development Strategy Guide.

Featured talks: The Future of Voice @ Webdagene 2017 in Oslo, Norway; The Future of Voice @ Amuse 2018 in Budapest, Hungary, The Future of Voice @ Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Opti-Pessimism at Interaction Latin America 2019 in Medellin, Colombia; Blank Page to World Stage at Interaction 18 in Lyon, France; Opti-Pessimism @ DEVit 360 2018 in Thessaloniki, Greece; When the Void Strikes Back: Broadcasting at Scale @ Interaction 19 in Seattle, WA; Modern Motivators of Play @ SLICE 2025 in Seattle, WA; Behind #TheUnlock at Riot Games @ Game Quality Forum 2023, Should You Build It? at Interaction 22, Future of Voice @ UX London 2018 in London, UK

As seen on 5 continents and in 15 countries

SELECTED CLIENTS AND EVENTS

Our talks and workshops have been seen and refined based on feedback from a variety of public and corporate audiences around the world.

TOP TALKS AND WORKSHOPS

Capturing Customer Context

Build a stronger foundation for your next-generation experiences with these improv-inspired customer outreach guidelines suitable for all skill levels.

Giving Voice to your Voice Designs

Learn what it takes to design a production-ready natural language voice interface, from constraints to guidelines and deliverables.

Multimodal Design Fundamentals

Get hands-on with the groundbreaking multimodal design frameworks and techniques content from the book "Design Beyond Devices."