There are moments when the universe confirms what you've been quietly practicing for years. Mine arrived through Airpods, this Tuesday morning, listening to Kelly Wearstler speak with Jay Shetty. Mainly about her journey as a designer but more briefly yet still profoundly the responsibility of designing spaces that hold human emotion. Her words weren't just familiar, they were the clear articulation of everything I'd been fumbling toward since starting off in the world of design, against my will, nearly 30 years ago....as a little one.
This Tuesday's collision of personal development and professional purpose, delivered through the voice of a designer who understood that we are not merely arranging furniture, we are curating the emotional landscapes and authentic experiences where people can return to themselves.
Before Design Had a Name
Before I was a designer, I was first a deeply sensitive observer of space. I was a child who was raised in an architect's home and shaped by every room I entered.
Pictured: Dad, Father, the coolest guy
Growing up in my father's world meant skipping school for weekend to week long trips at design conferences, sites where concrete was still tender, visits to landmarks that taught me the difference between monumentality and intimacy, and dinner table conversations that I don't even know where to begin from. I learned about design through osmosis, his reverence for structure, beauty, discipline and what I now jokingly call the "second-hand smoke effect".
But there was something else happening in those formative years, something my architect father couldn't teach me because it wasn't in any blueprint. I was cataloging how spaces made me feel. The way my shoulders relaxed in certain rooms and tensed in others. How my creativity flowed like water in some environments and dried up completely in spaces that felt sterile or overwhelming.
For the first two decades of my life, this hypervigilance felt like a burden. I was the child who couldn't concentrate in classrooms with fluorescent lighting, who felt inexplicably anxious in spaces with low ceilings, who could sense the emotional residue of the lightest conflict in rooms long after they'd ended. I thought I just thought that I was simply 'too sensitive'.
I had no idea I was developing what would become my greatest professional and personal asset: the ability to read the nervous system of space itself.
When Feeling Became Framework
The shift began in my early twenties, when I started tracking the patterns I'd been unconsciously collecting for years. It wasn't deliberate research at first, just notes in my phone about why I felt energized after meetings in certain spaces, and certain people. Or why some restaurants and cafes made me want to linger while others had me checking my watch within minutes.
What emerged was data. I discovered that I wasn't just responsive to beautiful spaces, I was attuned to the subtle orchestration of sensory elements that determine whether a room supports or sabotages the human experience, and most importantly at this time my own human experience.
In some spaces, I was lightweight and confident, bold and intuitive. In others, I found myself foggy-brained and flustered, more reserved and inexplicably anxious. The difference wasn't only about style or budget... it was about whether the designer had considered not just how the space looked, but how it would make someone feel to inhabit it. Sometimes it had nothing to do with the design at all, sometimes it was the people. Context is everything.
This realization would become the foundation of everything I would later practice as a designer: the understanding that we have the power to positively or negatively impact human wellbeing through the spaces we create. That design isn't just about aesthetics, it's about states of being.
Discovering the Intellectual Backbone
For years, I thought I was alone in this sensitivity-turned-methodology. Then I discovered Dr. Sally Augustin.
Pictured - Dr. Sally Augustin, principal of Design with Science
Her work in design psychology and neuroarchitecture gave me the vocabulary I'd been searching for. I devoured her book Designology, watched every talk and read every published journal I could find. Here was someone who understood that the intersection of neuroscience and spatial design wasn't just academically interesting, it was essential to creating environments that serve human flourishing.
From Dr. Augustin, I followed threads that led me deeper into a world I hadn't known existed. Tadao Ando's meditation on light and shadow as emotional conductors. Kengo Kuma's philosophy of architecture that disappears into nature. Ilse Crawford's revolutionary assertion that "design is a verb, not a noun"...a practice of care rather than an arrangement of objects.
Pictured: The Salk Institute by Louis Khan located in San Diego, California
I studied spaces that embodied this philosophy: the Salk Institute's marriage of brutalism and beauty, Ett Hem's domestic poetry, the sensory sanctuaries of Aman resorts. These people and spaces that understood their responsibility to the human nervous system.
What I was discovering wasn't a trend or a movement. It was a lineage of designers and architects who had always understood that minimalism could be emotional clarity rather than lazy, lack-lustre aesthetic emptiness. That luxury could be measured in how a space made you breathe rather than how much it costed to create.
The Architecture of Human States
This journey led me to develop what I now think of as a sensory intelligence framework. The sensory intelligence framework is a way of approaching design that honors the full spectrum of human perception. It begins with understanding that we don't just see spaces, we feel them through each of our senses:
Sight becomes about more than visual appeal. More about how light moves through a room, how shadows create intimacy, how sight lines can make a space feel protective or expansive.
Touch extends beyond materials to encompass temperature, humidity, the weight of air itself. It's understanding that a hand-carved stone surface carries different emotional information than machine-perfect marble.
Sound reveals itself as the often-overlooked sense that can make or break a space's success. The way footsteps sound on different floors, how voices carry or are absorbed, the presence or absence of what acoustic designers call "blessed silence."
Scent operates below conscious awareness but profoundly shapes our emotional response to place. It's the reason some homes feel instantly welcoming while others, despite their visual perfection, never quite invite you to stay.
Space itself, the flow, the proportions, the relationship between compression and release. Creates psychological states that we feel in our bodies before our minds can name them.
This isn't about achieving perfect sensory balance in every room. It's about understanding that every design choice is also an emotional choice, affecting not just how a space looks but how it holds the people who inhabit it.
I remember the first time I applied this framework consciously with a client. Through our conversations, I realized the issue wasn't the furniture or the lighting fixtures. It was that the room felt emotionally sterile, like a showroom that I have spoken about time and time again in previous articles. We recalibrated. Softer textures, warmer light temperatures, a subtle shift in the room's scent profile through carefully chosen materials.
That's when everything I understood became a practice: we're not just designing spaces. We're designing states of being.
The Sacred Responsibility
There's something almost sacred about this work when you understand its true scope. Every design decision ripples outward in ways we rarely pause to consider.
We are not just arranging objects in space, we are curating the emotional landscapes where people will fall in love, raise children, create their life's work, and find peace at the end of difficult days. This isn't hyperbole. This is the weight and privilege of what we do.
When I heard Kelly Wearstler articulate this understanding on Jay Shetty's podcast, I felt that divine confirmation that comes when you realize you're part of something larger than your individual practice. Here was one of the world's most celebrated designers speaking about the responsibility we have to create spaces that serve human wellbeing, not just visual consumption.
She spoke about tuning into energy, about the alchemy that happens when a space is calibrated to support rather than overstimulate. She understood what I'd been practicing for nearly a decade: that luxury isn't about what you can afford to put in a space but what you're wise enough to leave out.
For the Next Generation of Custodians
What I'm sharing now is the polished version of what has been a raw and often solitary journey. The years of second-guessing my sensitivity, the gradual realization that feeling everything could be a superpower rather than a burden, the slow accumulation of knowledge that would eventually become methodology.
I share it because I believe we are at an inflection point in design. As our world becomes increasingly digital and disconnected, post COVID we now spend up to 90% of our days indoors, the spaces we create become even more crucial to human wellbeing. We have the opportunity, and I would argue the responsibility, to create environments that don't just shelter our bodies but nurture our souls.
This is a call to architects, designers, developers, and investors: what we build, builds people. We are custodians of human experience in its most intimate form: the way people feel when they're alone with themselves in the spaces we've designed. The choices we make about light and shadow, texture and temperature, proportion and flow aren't just aesthetic decisions. They are decisions about how we want people to feel in the world we're creating for them.
This is not a responsibility to take lightly, but it's also not one to fear. It's an invitation to practice design as a form of care, and the hill that I will always land on, to create spaces that don't just look beautiful but feel like home to the human nervous system.
The next generation of designers doesn't have to spend years wondering if their humanness and attunement to senses in practice is a weakness. They can begin with the understanding that being sensitive to others and our environment is exactly the qualification this work requires. They can start sooner, softer, and clearer than those of us who had to discover this truth through trial and years of quiet observation.
Ultimately, the most profound architecture isn't about monuments or statements. It's about creating spaces where people return to themselves. Where they can breathe a little deeper, think a little clearer, and remember what it feels like to be truly at home in their own skin.
That's the sacred architecture of sensory design. And it's waiting for more practitioners who understand that design, at its highest expression, is an act of love.
You can watch Kelly Wearstler speak here on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty Podcast that inspired this article here.
Are you interested in deepening your understanding of sensory design? Explore these foundational resources:
Dr. Sally Augustin's "Designology,"
Ilse Crawford's "The Sensual Home"
Noora Oh's "The Sensory Home: Interior Design for Well-being"
Dr. Eve Edelstein's Ted Talk on Saving Lives by Design
Dr. Sally Augustin's TED Talk Design can help change the world for better
The American Psychological Association x Dr. Sally Augustin's podcast on The Psychology of Design
Health and Well-being for Interior Architecture edited by Dak Kopec
...and study the architectural philosophy of Tadao Ando. For contemporary examples, study the work of Ett Hem in Stockholm, the Six Senses resort properties, and the sensory intelligence embedded in Aman's approach to hospitality architecture. Here is a case study on their approach here.
