SocialTheory is a narrative medicine studio currently focused on allergy. We combine graphic medicine, adaptive technology, and clinical frameworks to help people, caregivers, and clinicians enter difficult conversations with a shared understanding.
We use illustrated narrative to turn clinical and psychosocial realities into moments patients, families, and clinicians can recognize and talk about together.
Structured reflection helps people surface and confirm what is on their mind. The platform uses those concerns to shape the narrative moments, reflections, and supports they encounter.
Each experience is grounded in clinical research and shaped with clinicians and people with lived experience, so the story, reflection, and decision support stay connected to real care.
In a world of generated content, we're made by hand.
Reading every label. Explaining it, again, to someone new. Deciding whether to say something or just go along with it. We design for the human factors, not just the medical ones.
Unknown ingredients. Cross contact. Explaining yourself at every birthday party, every first date, every new teacher. We design for the fear that isn't in the medical history, the fatigue of asking and explaining, and the quiet handoff from being managed to managing it yourself.
The three phone calls before a sleepover. The birthday cake that's a question mark. Wondering if their silence means “fine” or “hiding it.” We design for the isolation of being the only one keeping track, and for what it feels like to hand that responsibility over, a little at a time, without letting go too fast or too slow.
Before SocialTheory was a studio, it was a community exhibit series on opioid use disorder. Across four installations, Survival Story trained 110 participants in overdose response and distributed 177 Narcan kits — but its deeper work was quieter: giving people a language for the moments before a crisis.
Same method, new room: now we're bringing it into allergy, for the people living with it and the caregivers beside them.
"A woman in recovery left one installation determined to become a treatment counselor."Explore Survival Story