What if stronger communities began with better design? Erin Peavey and Nico Larco explore how walkable streets, human-scale neighborhoods, and thoughtful urban planning create places where everyday interactions flourish and lasting connections naturally grow.

Season 3 of Shared Space begins with Sara Hendren, exploring how inclusive design, interdependence, and accessibility can strengthen human connection. Discover why designing for diverse ways of living creates spaces where everyone can belong and thrive together.

Connection to others requires first being able to connect to yourself. This piece explores the surprising relationship between solitude and social health — and what it means to design spaces that honor both the need to be with others and the need to step away.

Why pity and sympathy can feel bad, and empathy can overwhelm our systems without balance.

Mental health month exercises designed to help you reflect on your current life, explore various life paths, and prototype experiences to build a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling.

For highly sensitive people and those with sensory processing differences, most spaces weren't built with their nervous systems in mind. This personal piece explores what it means to design for the full range of human experience — and why doing so makes spaces better for everyone.

A connected community isn't something that happens organically. It requires the right spatial conditions — and the right people in the profession to design them. This piece explores what the research says about community connection and why representation in design matters.

Growing up, I didn’t think I liked history — until I saw the broader view we’re not teaching in most schools.

Place can offer tangible proof of human wisdom, determination and courage. Architecture and design can be a reminder of our interconnectedness with nature and with each other.

Above my desk I have a quote that says, "when you focus on the good, the good gets better." This messages seems feels deeply rooted in this season of life.

More than half of American adults say having close friends is essential to a fulfilling life. And yet the trend lines are moving in the opposite direction. This piece shares key insights from Harvard's forum on social connection — including what the research says about how the built environment fits into the picture.

Sitting in the kitchen as a high school senior, I was tearing up again. Wet cheeks in my hand, I poured out my heart.

I recently had the honor of sitting down with the amazing NBC Texas Today host, Kristen Dickerson, to share ways to connect and how design can help heal loneliness.

Perched on white stool beside her, I was struck by something she said that is still rattling in my head today – that loneliness is such a sad word. And perhaps it is. I get it. No one wants to be lonely, and yet roughly 3 in 5 Americans are. Loneliness often feels like a personal fault, “what, no one wants to hang out with you?!” but that couldn’t be further from the truth, it is the trick that loneliness plays on our minds, and the way it grows in the darkness.

Working on a card for her new teacher my daughter hasn’t yet met, I ask “what message would you like me to write?” Cocking her head to the side and furrowing her brow, she considers, then looking up at me, says, “Dear Maestra… I love you so much… I hope you like me ok.”

Desperation is the culprit for so many ills. HOPE can be an antidote. And art can help to spark that hope.

Is there really a normal? And is it even something we should strive for? What is lost when we seek to conform?