Ā
A studio built for
what keeps getting lost.
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.
SenStoria was founded to work in that space. Designing the conditions that keep people visible, known, and recognizable to those who love them, even as life changes. This is Memory Experience Design.
THE PRACTICE
Why Memory Experience Design
Memory Experience Design is a field SenStoria is actively building. It draws together memory science, narrative psychology, neuroaesthetics, media psychology, and the living traditions of reminiscence and story into a unified practice.
Most approaches to memory and aging are deficit-based: detect the loss, slow the decline, manage the symptoms. Memory Experience Design asks a different question entirely. Not what is being lost, but what can be actively held, designed for, and made more visible.
The result looks different in every context. A family legacy experience. A care environment redesign. A dementia-friendly theatre production. A shared language framework for a care team. Each is distinct in form, unified by the same conviction: that human dignity is something we can design for.
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 ā€” 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.
Memory Experience Design is my attempt to build what was missing. A practice that takes seriously both the science of memory and the irreducible humanness of what it means to age, to change, to remain fully oneself in the eyes of the people who matter most.
My background is deliberately interdisciplinary: social gerontology, media psychology, family therapy, narrative and reminiscence therapy, experience design, and cinema therapy. 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 North America and the EU. This workĀ spans the globe, because the questions of memory, identity, and dignity in aging belong to every singleĀ one of us.