We have built care systems that keep people safe and engaged.
What we have not built, in most places, is the invitation to remain.
The art show they used to attend every year.
The family dinner where they still have things to say.
The theatre, the garden, the community that knew their name.
Presence-centred design is the work of changing that.
THE PROBLEM WE WORK ON
The separation that happens — and doesn't have to.
When a person receives a dementia diagnosis, something else often begins alongside it: a quiet withdrawal from the world. Not because they can no longer participate. But because the world stops offering the invitation.
Nursing homes become borders rather than places of community. Cultural institutions design around the assumption that older adults with cognitive change won't come. Families adapt gatherings around the person with dementia rather than designing them to include them fully. The art shows, the theatres, the ordinary social fabric of life — these things don't disappear. The invitation does.
This is not inevitable. It is a design failure. And like most design failures, it can be addressed by design.
What SenStoria designs is not care in the clinical sense. It is the conditions under which people remain present in their own lives — and in the lives of the people and communities that matter to them.
OUR PRACTICE
Memory Experience Design
A field SenStoria is actively building.
Memory Experience Design draws on memory science, neuroaesthetics, narrative psychology, media psychology, and the living traditions of reminiscence and story. It applies these not to slow decline, but to design the conditions under which identity, meaning, and connection remain visible — in families, in care systems, in cultural institutions, and in public life.
The question it asks is not: what is being lost? It is: what can be held, designed for, and made more present?
Each context looks different. All are unified by one conviction: that presence is possible, and that it can be designed for.
What We Design
Invitation back into life
Experiences, environments, and community programmes that bring people living with dementia back into the cultural and social fabric — the art shows, theatres, community spaces, and family gatherings they deserve to be part of. Design that says: you are still invited here.
Shared language for what matters
Frameworks that give families, care teams, and institutions the words to speak about identity, dignity, and change without reducing the person to their diagnosis. When language is precise and human, care becomes more human too.
Sensory and relational anchors
Objects, rituals, environments, and practices that help identity stay present in everyday life, because the body and the senses remember what words sometimes cannot hold. The aesthetic life of a person with dementia is not incidental. It is where presence lives.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Areas of practice.
Each offering is a different scale of the same argument: that presence is possible, and that it can be designed for. Begin wherever your need is clearest.
FLAGSHIP
Remembering Together
Digital Experience
A self-guided relational experience for families and individuals who want to begin at their own pace, before change feels urgent.
Guided Remembering
High-touch, facilitated relational continuity design for families navigating early memory change or life transition.
LEARN MORE →
ORGANISATIONS & INSTITUTIONS
Presence-Centred Consulting
Systems-level Memory Experience Design across four specialty areas:
START A CONVERSATION →
COMMUNITIES & ORGANISATIONS
Workshops & Speaking
Interactive programs for care teams, cultural organisations, and public audiences. In person and virtual.
ENQUIRE →
PUBLIC & PARTICIPATORY
Cultural & Immersive Experiences
Installations and participatory experiences that bring people living with dementia back into cultural life.
EXPLORE A COLLABORATION →
The invitation begins here.
Whether you are a family wanting to keep someone present in the life they have always known. A care organisation ready to examine what your spaces and language are communicating. A cultural institution asking who belongs in your work. Or a community that has quietly stopped inviting older adults in — and wants to change that.
SENSTORIA
New York