Phase I · The Atelier
The Design Commission.
Ninety minutes in Leonardo's workshop.
Your guild commissions a flying machine. Every choice carries real trade-offs, costed in florins: the vessel class (the agile Swift, the balanced Condor, or the maximum-prestige but unproven Dragon), the wing membrane material (proven linen, premium Florentine silk, durable animal gut, or Leonardo's own experimental aerostatic compound), and the motive power source. Facilities are selected too — armed guard, ship's physician, observation gallery, gaming salon, diplomatic messenger service, chapel — each a real decision about what the vessel, and its guild, actually values.
The output is a Sealed Commission Codex — a transfer code carrying every decision forward into Phase II and Phase III. Nothing decided here is forgotten later.
Phase II · The Patronage Pitch
The Hall of the Signoria.
Four patrons. Four different definitions of success.
Guilds present their commission before a panel of four Renaissance power-brokers, each scoring on entirely different terms:
Lorenzo de' Medici — prestige, ESG virtue, artistic magnificence. Suspicious of crude mechanical ambition. Will fund beauty, not industry.
Ludovico Sforza — military application, range, speed, capacity. Indifferent to ESG virtue. Rewards whoever shows him power and reach.
The Doge of Venice — trade routes, revenue viability, merchant capacity. Will not fund a beautiful loss-maker.
Cardinal della Rovere — the chapel, the physician, the messenger service. Suspicious of the gaming salon and the furnace. Will ask about the theology of flight.
The pitch itself runs in four timed movements — the Proposition (name the vessel, state the vision in one sentence), the Machine (argue the design choices, not recite them), the Passenger (a specific person who chooses this vessel, and why), and the Florin Account (the reckoning, open to verification). No single pitch satisfies all four patrons. Every guild must decide, under time pressure, whose approval matters most.
Phase III · Ground Operations
The crisis is not generic.
It is built from what you designed.
Ninety minutes, six stages, escalating from assessment to public account: Situational Assessment, Resource Inventory, Decision Sequence, Stakeholder Dispatch, Resolution Position, and a six-minute Situation Report delivered live to the panel.
The resources available in the crisis are exactly the facilities selected in Phase I — a guild that skipped the ship's physician does not acquire one when the crisis demands medical attention. Every decision in the log records not just what was decided, but which Phase I choice made that decision necessary. The same four patrons must now be managed as crisis stakeholders, alongside passenger families, Florentine authorities, and the Church.
Phase III is the diagnostic. Phase I was the data.
Status
Fully built.
Positioning still under development.
All three phases are complete and operational — the design tool, the patronage panel interface, and both the participant and facilitator consoles for the crisis phase. What remains open is who this is for and how it is delivered.
Audience — under consideration, deliberately kept broad: overseas business students, or young people on week-long school-holiday courses.
Format — either a single continuous day, or Phase I and Phase II spread across multiple half-day sessions over a week, closing with the Phase III crisis.
