How Our Brains React to the Spaces Around Us
You've felt it — walking into a building and sensing something before you've formed a conscious opinion about it. The science of why that happens is more precise than most people realize. This piece explores what your brain is actually doing in the first seconds of entering a space.
The Power of Just Starting
Real change begins with one small step. Inspired by Krista Nightengale and Better Block, this issue explores how community-driven design, simple acts of care, and welcoming public spaces can strengthen neighborhoods, improve mental well-being, and foster lasting belonging.
Third Places and True Connections: Redesigning Our Social Fabric
What if the strongest friendships begin with the places we gather? Explore how cafés, parks, libraries, and other third places create opportunities for belonging, meaningful conversation, and lasting community through intentional design and everyday hospitality.
Built to Belong: Designing Meaningful Connections + Actionable Insights
What makes a place feel like home? From cozy cafés to vibrant parks, discover how thoughtful design can spark connection, reduce isolation, and strengthen communities. Explore practical insights, the power of third places, and simple ways to build spaces where everyone belongs.
More Than Aesthetics: Nico Larco on Urban Design for Well-being
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.
The Wait Is Over: Shared Space Season 3!
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.
Can the Built Environment be Designed for Social Connection?
What do we actually mean when we say "designing for connection"? This piece breaks down the question — how architecture, interior design, and urban planning shape our social health, and what the evidence says about what works.
Joyful Solitude + Being Together in Nature
Solitude and connection aren't opposites - they strengthen one another. Discover how thoughtfully designed spaces, time in nature, and placemaking can nurture reflection, creativity, and deeper relationships with ourselves and the people around us.
Why Solitude Supports Social Connection
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.
Design with Pity vs Compassion
Why pity and sympathy can feel bad, and empathy can overwhelm our systems without balance.
Design Your Life
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.
Design That Celebrates Neurodiversity
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.
What Helps Create a Connected Community?
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.
Women’s History Month
Growing up, I didn’t think I liked history — until I saw the broader view we’re not teaching in most schools.
Places that Foster Social and Climate Resilience
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.
Mentorship Matters
Mentorship is not the exchange of services, but the building of a meaningful relationship between mentee and mentor. In that spirit, I wanted to share a few of my takeaways from amazing mentors and mentees in my life.
Focus on the Good
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.
Takeaways from Harvard’s Forum on Social Connection
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.
A Life of Purpose
Sitting in the kitchen as a high school senior, I was tearing up again. Wet cheeks in my hand, I poured out my heart.
The Upside of Our Craving for Connection
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.