About

Yesim Kunter is a recognized play expert and a creative strategist, understanding behaviour of people to create new experiences and define new opportunities.

Yesim is an independent consultant; developing play experiences for various costumers for product development, applying Play Philosophy to spaces, environments, communities, culture creation as well as market research with future scoping. She had been training organizations with diverse backgrounds from kids to professionals for leveraging Creativity and Innovation through Play Workshops.

Yesim worked at leading Industry for 12 years in various companies in different countries; such as Toys R Us, Lego and Hasbro. Trained as a toy designer and her passion to unravel the future to identify and define new experiences transformed her carrier to become a play-futurist.

Yesim was brought up in Turkey and lived in New York, Billund Denmark and now in London, which gave her a multi-cultural perspective that helps her to become a keen observer in human behaviour.

She has a highly curious mind with an explorer’s spirit. She was brought up in one of the most beautiful beaches of Turkey, enjoyed all the possibilities of childhood which gave me the chance to explore the depth of my imagination.

Then decided to study Architecture, went off to Ankara, during that time got interested in the magic of child’s mind, flew to New York for Toy Design Program at FIT, got more excited with the human behavior and product design worked for Toys’R US, but couldn’t resist to play with Lego so flew to Denmark, loved the magic of construction toys and its simplicity, but wanted more complex life and came to London and worked for 7 years for one of the most amazing team in the world as a Futurist. We had worked on so many exciting projects, which I can’t mention, been to so many seminars and conferences, worked and met with some of the most influential people, some from Hasbro some from MIT and others from all around the world.

She enjoyed and loved being a Futurist; exploring the unknown, finding new meanings and creating new experiences and translating that knowledge into concrete ideas.  But mostly I realized being a futurist is like having the Mind of a Child, the most important thing is first you need to have fun playing with the ideas, be curious, open minded, but also realistic, explore new meanings but also a communicate them to be able to translate the knowledge into the needs of others.

After all I became the Futurist but also wanted to combine the power of PLAY that I have learned over the years into its process. And founded my own independent consultant; Play to Innovate for new meanings that we can explore!

And her favorite quotes are;

‘Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish’ The Whole Earth Catalog1974

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” George Bernard Shaw

Futurist:

‘To survive, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before… he must understand in greater detail how the effects of acceleration penetrate his personal life, creep into his behavior and alter the quality of existence’ Future Shock, Alvin Toffler

You might wonder what a Futurist does? Well, we study the patterns of influences by observing foresights and envision what could happen in the future or some cases what should happen. This is more like a puzzle game and different combinations of information form new answers but also help us to come up with new solutions for different scenarios.