Most designers can already sense that certain spaces work and others just don’t. A room with generous daylight and natural materials puts you at ease in a way that a windowless corridor under fluorescent panels never will. We tend to chalk this up to good taste or instinct. But neuroscience suggests it’s biology.

Our brains evolved over tens of thousands of years to read environments for survival. For early humans, open sightlines, dappled light, organic forms and the presence of water and vegetation weren’t just aesthetic preferences. They were critical signals of safety and resources. And while the context in our modern world has changed dramatically, the wiring has not. Those same neural responses that kept our ancestors alive to see another day are firing in every lobby, every open office and every hospital waiting room we design. We need to account for, and not ignore, them.

A growing body of neuroscience research is replacing intuition with precision. We now know, for example, that natural light influences serotonin production. We understand that ceiling height measurably affects how people think, and that wood and other materials are associated with reduced stress responses. These are not soft claims about ambiance. They are physiological facts that shape how people experience the spaces we create.

HOK’s work in this space didn’t start with neuroaesthetics. It started with a commitment to neuroinclusion, and the science led us here.

The Foundation (2016–2025)

HOK has been researching and exploring ways to apply neuroinclusive design for over a decade now. We originally focused on the neurodivergent community. One of the first things we learned, though, was that the solutions didn’t stay narrow. Design that helped people at the edges of the sensory spectrum consistently made spaces better for everyone else, too.

The Catalyst (2025)

Kay Sargent’s Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces (Wiley, 2025) pulled years of research, surveys, pilots and design practice into a single framework. And last year’s edition of HOK Forward explored this topic further. It was an inspiring capstone of that body of work. Together, they marked a milestone in work that continues to evolve. But they also surfaced a bigger question.

The Next Chapter (2026 and Beyond)

That question is the subject of our 2026 HOK Forward: How the arts and aesthetic experiences within the built environment impact our brains, bodies and behavior, and how to design for a better experience.

Neuroinclusion is about creating environments, systems and cultures where people with all types of brain wiring—both neurotypical and neurodivergent—can participate fully and thrive. Neuroaesthetics sits at the intersection of science and design. It broadens the aperture, examining how we neurologically respond to artistic elements and experience beauty and “pleasing” stimuli. It focuses on how and why we “feel” space before we can even think about it.

We’re moving from designing for sensory and cognitive processing to understanding and designing for physiological responses. From intuitive design to intentionality.

For most of the last century, the prevailing view of cognition treated the brain like a computer—input in, processing, output out. The environment was scenery. The brain observed it, evaluated it and moved on. That model is clean, intuitive and, according to a growing body of neuroscience, incomplete.

Researchers now use the term embodied cognition to describe what’s really happening. The environment, the body and the mind aren’t operating sequentially. They’re working as a single system, and your body reads a room before your mind does.

Architectural theorist Harry Francis Mallgrave, PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, has spent his career arguing the implications for design. Researchers in this area have shown that our emotional and sensory-motor systems evaluate a space before we consciously reflect on it—through the body’s actual and anticipated movements as much as through what we see. Mallgrave’s Architecture and Embodiment explores how findings from biology, neuroscience and related fields should reshape architectural thinking.

Consider what it looks like in practice. A high-ceilinged atrium with natural light doesn’t just look open. It feels right before we can even explain why. A poorly lit corridor with fluorescent fixtures does the opposite.

Neuroaesthetics makes this legible to designers. The discipline doesn’t change what good designers have always sensed. It simply explains why it works, and it gives us the language and evidence to stop treating it as instinct and start treating it as practice.

Neuroaesthetics has only been a named field for a few decades, which in neuroscience terms makes it brand new. But the results coming in are already clear: the spaces we design aren’t just backdrops. They are physical triggers that dictate how our bodies function.

People gravitate toward smooth, curved shapes; sharp angles can create the opposite response. Design traditions have long associated curves with safety, movement and expression, and the science increasingly supports the intuition. A fMRI study co-authored by Dr. Anjan Chatterjee found that people judge curvilinear interior spaces as more beautiful than rectilinear ones, and that viewing curved spaces activates brain regions tied to emotion and aesthetic experience. This may help explain why organic forms and fractal patterns that mimic nature consistently elicit positive emotional responses. When we fill interiors with hard edges and flat planes, we’re working against those instincts.

Nature isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s a physiological requirement. We know that exposure to natural environments like forests can significantly reduce stress hormones. And Professor Roger Ulrich’s landmark 1984 study found that post-surgical patients with a view of trees had shorter hospital stays and needed less pain medication than those facing a brick wall.

Not all our senses are elective. You can close your eyes or avoid touching something, but you can’t close your ears or stop smelling. Because environments are always acting on us, their design can amplify or diminish how we respond.

We miss these signals because of scale. Our senses take in approximately 11 million bits of information every second. Our conscious mind handles about 50 of them. The rest is handled by survival wiring. It’s why “neuro-hostile” design is so insidious. Most people in an office won’t even be able to identify a low ceiling or a flickering light as the problem. They just find themselves struggling to focus, hitting a wall by 2 p.m. and going home to finish their work.

Every space we design is already performing a biological intervention on the people inside it, whether we plan for it or not. Light is regulating hormones. Ceiling height is shaping cognition. Materials are signaling safety or threat. Spatial sequences are guiding movement and emotion. None of this is optional. It is happening in every building, every room and every corridor we create. The only question is whether we do it by accident or by design.

The chapters ahead translate this science into practice and provide a framework for measuring how people experience space, a repeatable process any design team can use and a conversation with one of the field’s leading researchers about where this exciting work is heading next.

We are no longer designing environments. We are designing experiences for the body, the brain and for human flourishing.