About Naturate - Design and technology for nature, education and place.
Naturate is a small design and technology studio founded by Johan Gace. We work with organisations whose work lives in the physical world: parks, gardens, museums, educators, conservation teams and place-based businesses.
Most projects start with a concrete problem. A place needs better interpretation. A team has useful knowledge but no product around it. A route or guide should work digitally and stay maintainable. An organisation wants to use AI without adding another vague tool.
We combine product design, frontend and full-stack engineering, mapping, AI and rapid prototyping. Naturate can take a project from discovery to a working release, or join an existing team as the technical partner for the part that is difficult to deliver.
We also build our own nature-tech products and experiments, including Nature Class, Rewyld and WyldQuest. That keeps the studio close to the realities of outdoor learning, route and guide experiences, location-aware products and AI systems that need trustworthy context.
Principles - How we work
Useful, testable and built for the people who will actually run it.
Start with the real problemTechnology earns its place by making a concrete job, experience or decision better.
Prototype before committingBuild enough to test the hard part early, then use evidence to decide what deserves a full build.
Keep it understandablePrefer clear interfaces, legible systems and fewer moving parts over unnecessary complexity.
Design for the real settingA tool used on a trail, in a classroom or by a small team has different constraints from a generic software product.
Leave room to adaptContent, conditions and organisations change. The systems we hand over should be maintainable after launch.
Keep human judgment in the loopAI can search, draft and assist. People remain responsible for consequential decisions and final outputs.
Johan Gace
Johan is a product designer and engineer with a background in AI product development. At Amazon Alexa, he led prototyping for conversational AI and LLM interfaces. Earlier roles included machine-learning product prototyping and enterprise software engineering.
He now works across product, engineering and the outdoors: building Naturate projects, creating nature-tech products and guiding people outside.
The through-line is practical technology that helps an organisation do its work better without making the technology the point.
Johan Gace
Explore services, visitor experiences, digital products and our work.