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A studio built for the people
who get designed out.
Every day, in families and care systems around the world, something quietly disappears. Not just memory. But the felt sense of who someone is. Their dignity. Their story. What they cared about most and what they built across a lifetime.
Older adults — and those living with cognitive change — are not withdrawing from life. The world is withdrawing from them. The environments, institutions, and systems around them were built for one kind of mind. Everyone else gets accommodated, managed, or quietly left out.
SenStoria was founded to change that. We design the conditions that keep people visible, known, and present — in their families, in their communities, and in the wider world.
THE PRACTICE
Threshold Design
Threshold Design is the practice SenStoria is actively building. It works at the intersection of three simultaneous domains — self, relationships, and environment — because a person is held in the world, or designed out of it, across all three at once.
Our practice draws on memory science, neuroaesthetics, narrative psychology, media psychology, and family systems thinking. It applies these not to manage decline, but to design the conditions under which identity, meaning, and connection remain visible.
Most approaches to aging are deficit-based: detect the loss, slow the decline, manage the symptoms. Threshold Design asks a different question. Not what is being lost, but what can be actively held, designed for, and made more present.
The result looks different in every context. A family continuity experience. A care environment redesign. A dementia-inclusive theatre production. A shared language framework for a care team. Each is distinct in form, unified by the same conviction: that presence is something we can design for.
Memory Experience Design is our specialist practice within Threshold Design — for families and institutions navigating cognitive change specifically. It is where the Threshold of Threes framework meets the particular conditions of memory loss, drawing on reminiscence, sensory anchoring, and relational continuity to design for what remains, not only what is lost.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Six convictions that guide everything we do.
Presence is possible, and it can be designed for
Not just safety or comfort but the felt sense of being genuinely connected to one's own experience, to others, and to the world.
Neurodistinction is not deficit
A different relationship to memory, time, and narrative is not a lesser one. The design failure has been building systems for one kind of mind.
The invitation is a design decision
Who gets included in family life, cultural life, and community life is not accidental. It is the result of choices — and choices can be redesigned.
Dignity is relational
You feel dignified when others treat you as a full person. The design challenge extends beyond environments to how families, care teams, and institutions behave.
This work belongs to everyone
Memory change, identity transition, and the experience of being designed out of the world are not niche concerns. They touch every family, every community, every institution that works with aging adults.
Caregivers deserve to be held too
The people who do this work alongside those they love are also navigating a threshold. Designing for presence means designing for the whole relational system, not just the person at its center.
A NOTE FROM OUR FOUNDER
Dr. Julie Watson
I built SenStoria because I could not find the field I was looking for.
I had spent years at the intersection of gerontology, psychology, media, and human experience — studying how people make meaning, how stories shape identity, how memory and narrative hold a self together across time. And I kept arriving at the same gap: the people most in need of this thinking were largely being served by systems that did not speak this language at all.
What I kept seeing was not just a clinical gap. It was a design gap. Older adults, and especially those with cognitive change, were being quietly designed out of the world they still lived in. Not out of malice — out of default. The environments, the language, the systems of care had all been built around a particular kind of mind and a particular idea of what aging looks like. Everyone else was an afterthought.
Threshold Design is my attempt to build what was missing. A practice that works across the full arc of that problem from the sensory environment of a care facility to the shared language a family uses at the dinner table. From the way a cultural institution designs its programming to the way a family holds someone through early memory change.
My background is deliberately interdisciplinary: social gerontology, media psychology, family therapy, narrative and reminiscence, experience design. I have spent my career learning to see what gets minimized in moments of change, and to design practices and experiences that keep it visible.
SenStoria is based between New York and Europe, working with families, organizations, and cultural institutions across The Americas and Europe. The questions of presence, identity, and dignity in aging belong to all of us.
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