Cotton Candy Castles & TRUE Story PVD Design Tales By Anthony Mark Ruspantini Yesterday the flash fiction piece “Cotton Candy Kate & Her Design Castle in the Sky” hit the streets and was published by A.B. Marcus on the Design Adventure Stories website. - Read the Full Story - Link: designadventurestories.com Our readers immediately recognized something beneath the sugary surface. What seemed like a playful fable about a designer on Empire Street was, in truth, a thinly veiled allegory about one of the most infamous business design debacles in Rhode Island history ~ 38 Studios. The parallels were intentional. Kate Studios was a stand-in for 38 Studios, its name softened from a number to something more approachable. The setting ~ Providence, on Empire Street ~ wasn’t chosen at random either; it was where the real company set up shop back in 2011 and 2012 - that went from Boom to Bust in just over a year in Rhode Island's Capital City Providence. Kate’s reliance on borrowed funds mirrored the $75 million loan guarantee that Rhode Island extended to Curt Schilling’s studio. And the swift unraveling of her “cotton candy castle” was a metaphor for what happens when ambition outpaces grounding in practical responsibility. What fascinates me is how design stories allow us to heal from complex and painful realities in accessible ways. Of course, our Design Adventure Stories could revisit spreadsheets, legal filings, and investigative reports ~ but a simple fable can reach wider audiences. By stripping away the technicalities, it distills the moment into something universal: the allure of grand visions, the dangers of overreach, and the reminder that most design dreams must be balanced with discipline. We believe Providence still lives with the shadow of that collapse, but also with a new lesson learned. And perhaps that’s where creativity has its quiet power ~ retelling local history in allegorical form lets us confront it, learn from it, and carry those lessons into our future design projects. So Cotton Candy Castle Kate isn’t just a allegory story about failure. It’s a story about what we choose to build next. Design biz cotton candy castles of sugar, or design structures that endure so that we can get on to the business of Design ~ from the Home of RISD & The Design Capital of New England ~ In The Land of Prov! The End.