About
PLAYSTRUCK - A human wellbeing studio.
PLAYSTRUCK helps organizations discover opportunities, solve complex challenges, and design products, services, brands, experiences, and communities that create lasting impact.
What We Do
Through research, strategy, experience evaluation, design thinking, and creative problem-solving, we help our clients understand the people they serve and transform those insights into meaningful action. Behind it all sits a coherent, research-backed design philosophy we have been building for over a decade: how people think, play, connect, and pay attention, and what it takes to design for all of them at once. The philosophy stays ours. The results become yours.
WOMEN-FOUNDED
Co-founded and led by two award winning women builders
Childrens media, government, non-profit, startup, fortune 500, wellness, ed tech & higher ed.
CERTIFIED NY MWBE
New York State certified Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise
TWO COASTS
Offices in Rochester, NY and Los Angeles, CA
Understanding globalization and localization.
40+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
with over 40 years combined experience in product design, experience design, education and community building across multiple industries.
Built by people who design for people.
The humans who human.
Our team's experience spans some of the most trusted names in learning and play, including Sesame Workshop, MIT Media Lab, Disney, and Khan Academy Kids. We bring that same rigor and care to every study we run and every insight we deliver.
Our group is certified and credentialed across the disciplines that make research human: design thinking, UX research, psychology and cognitive science (including PhD-level researchers), play, art and design, and care fields.
PLAYSTRUCK designs for all kinds of minds from the start. That commitment shapes how we recruit participants, how we write our questions, and how we listen: everyone belongs in the room, and every perspective helps reveal the whole picture.
Insight lives in the mix.
One voice is an opinion. A room full of different voices, experiences, and vantage points is understanding. We built Whole Room Research™ to bring organizations closer to the real, varied people their work is meant to serve.
But a room is more than a headcount. People are never just one thing: the same person is a parent, a professional, a patient, and a beginner, sometimes within the same hour. And the people you impact are interconnected. Someone buys, someone else uses, a third person watches and joins in.
We look at the whole individual, and at the situations and connections that surround them while they are actually using your product or experience.
Rooms are also physical, digital, and hybrid. A kitchen table, an app, a museum floor, a classroom that lives in all three at once. We study your experience in the kind of room it will actually live in.
Whole Room Theory™ is one of the core pillars of our proprietary Multiminded Design™ practice - the foundation of our work for building for muti-faceted humans in the modern age: because we believe the best decisions come from understanding the whole room.