EXPLORE OUR DESIGN SERVICES.
GAME DESIGN
WE BRING OUR GAME DESIGN EXPERTISE TO YOU.Games reach and engage teens in an unmatched way. We use our teen mental health and game design expertise to translate our clients' educational programming, expertise, research, and vision into games. We help our clients imagine and create game solutions that are meaningful and impactful for young people. We work with a large network of development partners to create whatever kind of game you imagine, whether it's played on a table or a tablet, a mobile device or computer, with a virtual reality (VR) headset or on a console. OUR TEAM CAN DESIGN A GAME WITH YOU THAT:
WE'LL MANAGE THE GAME DESIGN PROCESS FOR YOU FROM START TO FINISH, AND:
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GAME CONSULTING
OUR TEEN MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTISE ADDS ANOTHER DIMENSION TO THE LIFETIME VALUE METRIC STUDIOS TYPICALLY TRACK. WE HELP YOU ELEVATE THE GAMES YOU CREATE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES INTO WELLNESS-SUPPORTING EXPERIENCES.
Games present an opportunity to reach teens in meaningful ways that support their understanding of themselves and the world. We bring our adolescent development expertise to the games industry, helping studios, from AAAs to indies, fold social and emotional skill-building—a practice proven to protect teen mental health—into the games they create, elevating their impact on and for their young audiences.
OUR GAME CONSULTING SERVICES INCLUDE:
GAME AUDITS & REVIEWS:We have the knowledge, network, and integrity to perform comprehensive audits and reviews of games—tabletop, app-based, web-based, console-based, or extended reality (XR)—designed for teen audiences with an eye toward what best protects and promotes their mental health. We evaluate your game against the science of how adolescents grow, benchmarking it against teens' developmental strengths and vulnerabilities to devise and share actionable recommendations that elevate the player experience to a wellness-supporting one. Our expert-led game audit and review process:
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IMPACT-DRIVEN UX RESEARCH:The most impactful experiences for teens respond to their social and emotional needs. We bring our co-design model with teens, an innovative UX research method, to help you and your team expand games and envision new ones with young people that transform them in wellness-supporting ways. Led by our teen mental health and experience design experts, our co-design model brings innovative creative and cognitive tools to teens and skillfully engages them in the planning and building of your game. Our UX research method fosters a collaborative workspace where your team and teen co-designers learn, explore, and share with each other, helping you:
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:We offer customized professional development programs that expand game studios' capacity to design supportive experiences for teen audiences. Whether you are looking for in-service training or an ongoing professional learning series, we have the mental health and instructional design expertise to deliver high-quality and hands-on solutions that empower your team with actionable knowledge and skills to create impactful games for young people. |
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EXHIBITION DESIGN
WE HELP YOU CREATE EXHIBITIONS THAT EXPAND YOUNG PEOPLE'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, SUPPORTING HOW THEY SHOW UP IN IT.
Any experience designed for young people presents an opportunity to meaningfully support their exploration, discovery, and mental health. We use our expertise in experience design, teen development, and educational psychology to lead the design of exhibitions that are intellectually stimulating, emotionally nurturing, and personally relevant for young people.
We work closely with your team, stakeholders, and collaborators to create meaningful and highly engaging narrative experiences in any venue—from museums to public spaces—that are tailored to the science of how teens learn best and what's needed to protect and promote their mental health in today's world.
WE CAN HELP YOU DESIGN EXHIBITIONS THAT:
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| showcase stories, art, history, and products in dynamic, engaging, and resonant ways for young audiences. | convey a multi-layered narrative that skillfully folds in social and emotional skill-building—a practice proven to protect and promote teen mental health | animate the work of discovery to inspire thought, action, and community-building along the way |
WE'LL MANAGE THE EXHIBITION DESIGN PROCESS FOR YOU FROM START TO FINISH, AND:
- Skillfully engage young people in the crafting of your exhibition's interpretive plan or learner journey, folding in their wisdom, needs, and creativity as we collectively outline goals, objectives, and key messages.
- Collaborate with your team to define and refine your exhibition's big ideas, key messages, and critical questions, aligning them with the needs and preferences of young audiences.
- Craft a narrative with content that seamlessly and expertly integrates social and emotional learning—a practice proven to protect and promote young people's mental health—throughout the visitor experience, helping to elevate your exhibition to a wellness-supporting experience for young audiences.
- Center accessibility standards and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in concept development, environment design, and visitor experience, building in multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN (LXD)
WE HELP YOU CREATE LEARNING EXPERIENCES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE THAT NOURISH THEIR CURIOSITY, ENGAGE THEM MEANINGFULLY, AND IMPART A LASTING MESSAGE.
Our empathy-driven design approach centers teens. We use our game and instructional design expertise to help you create learning experiences that are intellectually stimulating, emotionally nurturing, and personally meaningful for middle and high school students, and tailored to the science of how they learn best.
We create through the lens of emotion and connection, helping you craft an engaging and impactful learning journey for young people that integrates experiential, reflective, and hands-on activities, has real-world application, and embeds social and emotional learning—a practice proven to protect and promote their mental health and facilitate deep engagement.
FOR SCHOOLS AND OUT-OF-SCHOOL TIME (OST) PROGRAMS:
We provide strategic direction and actionable guidance to middle and high school leaders and curriculum creators, using empathy-based design practices, social and emotional health expertise, and effective instructional design methods to help them create impactful learning experiences for teens. We support learning experience design (LXD) in your school environment by:
- Conducting an analysis that goes beyond typical user interviews and abstract personas by skillfully engaging young people in the mapping of schoolwide social and emotional learning needs
- Creating curriculum maps and learning journeys that facilitate experiential learning, nurture young people's genius, and support their active engagement, reflection, and meaning-making
- Masterfully folding social and emotional learning and skill-building opportunities into content
- Integrating innovative, responsive ways to engage young people (i.e., tech-powered, web-based, game-based learning activities)
FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT AND CAREER READINESS PROGRAMS:
Your career development or vocational program prepares young adults for the workforce. We help you embrace a holistic approach to career readiness, elevating your program to a learning experience that puts young people at the center and builds their technical skills along with essential social and emotional ones. We help you design an integrated workforce development or career readiness program or expand your existing one to:
- Create a learning experience that sharpens essential skills—which some refer to as "soft skills"—such as problem solving, collaboration, interpersonal communication, and stress management
- Animate experiential learning with hands-on, social and emotional skill-building (e.g.,responsible decision-making, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and self-awareness) opportunities
- Maximize the job success of program participants by preparing them to take on complex, real-world challenges
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY DESIGN
WE BRING EMPATHY-DRIVEN DESIGN TO EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, HELPING YOU CREATE TOOLS THAT UNIQUELY ENGAGE AND SPARK THE CURIOSITY OF YOUNG PEOPLE.
Educational technology is a core fixture in the 21st-century classroom. We bring empathy-driven design to your ed-tech idea, helping you develop and test tools and tech-powered learning experiences that are tailored to the genius of young people, uniquely engage them, and spark their curiosity. Our social and emotional learning and instructional design expertise enables us to align technological considerations with psychological and pedagogical ones, creating innovative tech-enabled solutions that meet today's diverse student and educator needs in face-to-face, blended, or online learning environments.
WE CAN HELP YOU DESIGN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY THAT:
demonstrates evidence of educational impact |
responds to and reflects diverse learner needs, strengths, and preferences |
fosters experiential learning and student collaboration |
In close collaboration with your team, we'll manage the educational technology design process from planning to deployment. You can trust us to:
- Skillfully engage young people and fold their wisdom, needs, behaviors, observations, and identified pain points throughout to support the efficacy and usability of the tool.
- Serve as thought partners and collaborate with your team and stakeholders to define and refine learning goals and ideal outcomes.
- Lead and orient a team of developers and programmers around defined objectives, ensuring user flow, UI/UX elements, and visual design language make the learning as impactful as possible for young people.
- Leverage the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to support accessibility, building in multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression to meaningfully engage the widest possible range of learners.
- Expertly integrate into the final product features that support social and emotional skill-building—a practice proven to protect and promote young people's mental health.
PROGRAM PLANNING
WE HELP YOU DESIGN A PROGRAM FOR TEENS THAT NURTURES, NOURISHES, AND CHALLENGES THEM.
Thoughtful planning is critical to impactful youth programming. As experts in adolescent development and mental health, we know what makes a setting or experience supportive of positive teen growth. We bring our expertise to your program planning process, helping you design an out-of-school time (OST) program that uniquely engages middle and high school students, and expands their understanding of themselves, others, and the world.
Our iterative, teen-centered co-design process produces sustainable programs, infusing teen wisdom at the onset of planning and into the culture of the program. Beyond program design and evaluation, we use our teen mental health and experience design expertise to help you create a trauma-informed program and an inclusive space supportive of meaningful learning, reflection, and connection.
WE CAN HELP YOU DESIGN A PROGRAM THAT:
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uses experiential learning as a lever for meaning-making, problem solving, and systems thinking |
fosters belonging, connection, and relationship-building among participants |
supports teen wellness by skillfully folding in social and emotional skill-building—a practice proven to promote teen mental health |
integrates hands-on, interactive activities that have real-world applications |
As thought partners in the program design process, you can trust us to:
- Skillfully engage prospective youth participants through a co-design process that helps us specify needs, fold their wisdom and feedback in throughout, and create responsively.
- Work collaboratively and iteratively across teams and with collaborators to create, review, and refine program objectives and an evaluation plan that assesses program impact.
- Co-create learning experiences that integrate social and emotional skill-building, evidence-based and teen-tested instructional strategies, and hands-on and real-world applicable activities
- Leverage the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to build in multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression throughout the program experience.
UX RESEARCH
OUR CO-DESIGN MODEL IS UNIQUELY TEEN-CENTERED. WE USE IT TO ENSURE YOUR PRODUCT OR EXPERIENCE IS TEEN-CENTERED TOO.
Designing meaningful products and experiences for teens demands a holistic understanding of them, not just as users or consumers, but as dynamic and developing people. The iThrive co-design model, an innovative, strengths-based UX research method, helps your team arrive at this understanding, generate new ideas, and design in response to teens' expressed preferences and unrealized social and emotional needs.
Through a blend of game design and social and emotional learning activities devised by teen mental health and learning experts, the iThrive co-design model goes beyond typical discovery research activities like contextual inquiry and surveys by amplifying and integrating teen voice, setting the scene for the design of transformative, teen-centered products and experiences.
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We bring this UX research method to your brainstorming efforts, helping your team answer key questions like:
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THE NUANCE THAT COMES FROM THE ITHRIVE CO-DESIGN MODEL HELPS YOUR TEAM DISCOVER SOLUTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATION. THE EXPERIENCE THAT CO-DESIGNING CREATES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE IS AFFIRMING, PLAYFUL, AND SUPPORTIVE OF THEIR CREATIVITY, WELLNESS, AND CURIOSITY.