Understand, Connect, Translate, Sustain methodology—and how the new Child Experience bootcamp fits in
It all started from a dream, an intuition that I was onto something that can help many child experience practitioners at once. A sense that there are shared foundations and principles that start from children and could be helpful to many roles across the diverse ecosystem of children’s industries. This began cooking years ago, and 2025 was the year where it all came together into a methodology that supports child experience thinking and making.
The idea is that all practitioners working in children’s spaces are on a journey—moving through the same phases, facing comparable challenges, and navigating a journey of connecting to child experience and creating a habit to deepen it. If we approach it from the growth mindset, taking inspiration from artists and other masters of their craft, we may significantly improve our confidence, our virtuosity and the quality of our outcomes.
The phases—what I call dimensions of action (and sometimes refer to as layers for simplicity)—are Understand, Translate, Connect, and Sustain. I’ll explain each one first, and then how they interconnect.
Understand
There are many things we need to understand before we even start to design, create, or make—whatever that looks like in your role.
For example:
Who are the children we serve? Do we know enough about them and the caring adults in their life?
What do we know about their everyday lives and the context of their childhoods?
How do we decide what’s good for them? What values and principles guide us?
What gift are we offering to these children? Why is our solution worth giving to them? Is there a better, simpler alternative?
How is this different from designing for other groups? Not much and very much at the same time. The key difference is that we must make the best effort to do things right from the start, because we are actively participating in raising the children we serve (whether we are aware of it or not).
The ‘move fast and break things’ mentality is not acceptable—not anymore, not if we want to be well as a humanity. Committing to this means taking radical responsibility. It means accepting that designing for children is complex and sensitive, rewarding and joyful, frustrating and fulfilling. It is definitely challenging and so worth it.
Connect
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already convinced that children should be part of the process, and that researching and co-designing with them is a cornerstone for success. So why isn’t this yet common practice—at least not at the scale we might expect by now? Especially given the generous abundance of resources and best practices around youth participation. My guess is that there are more gaps than we tend to realize.
Lately, I keep discovering how many things that are obvious to us are unknown or hard to people outside of child-focused circles. And even for those of us deeply in the field, there is no such thing as too basic. At any stage of our careers, the more we return to the basics, the better we become.
With this in mind, there is always a room to ask:
Am I comfortable around the children I serve? Be specific and honest, ease with five-year-olds does not automatically mean ease with thirteen-year-olds.
How well do I build trust and connect with them in real time?
What is my personal go-to style and ways to interact with them?
There are tools that can help you figure out how to involve children (have a look at the new Child Experience Goodies Library). And yet, like with every other tool, it takes skill, practice and preparation to truly make them your own.
Translate
So we understand the children, the values, the vision. We’ve gathered insights through research and working with children. Now what?!
This is where the translation begins!
One of my favorite definitions of design is decision-making. Every insight can be translated to an infinite amount of micro-decisions. Choosing the right ones—for the people, the context, and the moment—is the art of design. Translation is a craft. Each decision shaping the form of the final piece, our outcome.
Continuing the thread of radical responsibility: every decision touches the children who interact with what we create, with potential short-, mid-, or long-term impact. So practicing translation is our duty.
Practicing our translation skills can be done in many ways and we can take inspiration from any discipline that is close to us. For example, my background in acting, linguistics and yoga influence how I observe, pay attention, make meaning, and translate findings to my work.
What are yours? Play with it, until you find what you already have that can help you here.
Sustain - make room and scale deep
Sustain is a space for us to integrate Understand, Connect, Translate into our routine—turning them into habits, practices, rituals, and reliable strategies.
This is the dimension where we connect to the child experience goals that call us forward, where we look systemically at our journey from above, and where we create the conditions for continuity and depth, for our success.
Sustain is not about doing more or trying harder (Here’s a great podcast episode in Hidden Brain on the topic of Battle of Wills). It’s about making room, building the infrastructure that lets you practice skills aligned with your purpose and scaling deeply.
How the Child Experience Bootcamp comes in
Are you noticing emerging patterns?
As professionals, we’re expected to perform well—constantly and consistently. This focus on doing can quietly drain us over time. Occasionally, we shift into learning mode—driven by curiosity, role demands, or changes in our environment.
But there are two other modes we often overlook or underinvest in—modes that can truly fuel our growth and support joyful, meaningful making.
This November, on World Children’s Day, I launched the Child Experience Bootcamp as a space to expand beyond just doing and learning into something deeper: developing practice and building infrastructure. It’s a place to slow down and grow together, integrating Understand, Connect, Translate, and Sustain dimensions into our work. The Bootcamp offers a wide repertoire of resources, tools and frameworks you can tailor, pick, and mix—helping you focus your energy on fine-tuning your knowledge and toolbox and mastering their use. The Child Experience Goodies Library, curated for the Bootcamp, is open to everyone.
Just keep swimming
I hope this Understand, Connect, Translate, and Sustain methodology will provide a shared language, a bridge between intention and practice, and craft-in-practice for our growing community of child experience practitioners.
How you do choose to do this foundational work is totally up to you,—collectively through the Bootcamp, individually via 1:1 coaching, or independently—depending on where you are in your journey. All that matters is that you keep moving forward, guided by your inner compass of goodness.