About SenStoria
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 humor. Their history. What they cared about most.
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.
Where It Comes From
The gap that started everything.
Older adults and those living with memory change are not withdrawing from life. The world just stops designing for them. The environments, institutions, and systems around them were built for one kind of mind, one kind of memory, one kind of presence.
This is not a clinical failure. It is a design failure. And design failures have design solutions.
SenStoria works at that gap, between the person someone still is and the world that has stopped quite seeing them. We build the conditions for presence, recognition, and belonging across families, care settings, and cultural life.
People at the threshold of change are not post-life. They are post-invitation. And the invitation can be redesigned.
The Practice
Threshold Design
Threshold Design works across 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 ask: what is being lost, and how do we slow it? Threshold Design asks a different question. Not what is being lost, but what can be actively held, designed for, and made more present.
Specialist Practice
Memory Experience Design
Our specialist practice within Threshold Design, for families and institutions navigating cognitive change specifically. It draws on memory science, neuroaesthetics, narrative psychology, and family systems thinking, designed for what remains, not only what is lost.
What We Believe
Six things we know to be true.
These are not aspirations. They are the beliefs that shape every engagement, every offering, and every design decision SenStoria makes.
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.
A different relationship to memory is not a lesser one.
The design failure has been building systems for one kind of mind. A different relationship to memory, time, and narrative deserves to be designed for, not accommodated around.
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 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.
A Note from Our Founder
Dr. Julie Watson
Media Psychologist · Social Gerontologist · Founder, SenStoria
I built SenStoria because the practice I kept looking for didn't exist.
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.
Threshold Design is my attempt to build what was missing. A practice that works across the full range 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 spans social gerontology, media psychology, family therapy, narrative and reminiscence, and 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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