The challenges of designing within the coupled natural-human systems of contemporary cities and landscapes to respond to climate change, the risk of natural disasters and equal access to healthy environments are often termed “wicked” problems – where many interacting systems are in play, the outcomes uncertain, and the implications ambiguous. The Geodesign addresses such problems well but many participants are ill-prepared to participate; planners, scientists, policy-makers and citizens are unfamiliar with each other’s core principles, values, methods and metrics for success. An introductory phase of planning comprising geo-inspired story-telling, game-playing and exploration has been proposed as a solution. With undergraduate landscape architecture students as test respondents, readily available Weebly® and Google Docs®, Esri GeoPlanner® and Story Maps® and a variety of other web- and app-based tools were used to develop a web-based story-telling structure to address the problem of concurrently protecting and developing adjacent to the Rock and Shoals Outcrop Natural Area near Athens, Georgia, USA, a regionally-significant yet fragile biodiversity resource. The site selection for a hypothetical snail farm was used to introduce GeoPlanner® as the Geodesign platform, the unfamiliar topic chosen deliberately to engage students in bringing fresh thought to design scenarios. The RSONA project provided a “double-loop” learning structure in which student participants, through repeated attempts to solve problems, modified their original goal and learned to act from the perspective of their own expertise while maintaining explicit awareness of the many others in play.