The Brain Behind Beauty

Before we decide whether we like it

Long before we form a conscious opinion about an environment, our sensory systems are already at work. Light enters our eyes. Sound reaches our ears. Our skin registers temperature and texture. Our body understands its position in space. We detect movement around us. Our brain continuously integrates this stream of information while prioritising what deserves our attention and what recedes into the background.

The thalamus plays an important role in this process. Sitting deep within the brain, it acts as a major relay and regulatory hub between sensory systems and the cerebral cortex. Rather than behaving like a simple switchboard, it participates in regulating how sensory information reaches cortical networks and which signals receive priority. The cortex then participates in the extraordinary process through which sensation becomes perception, interpretation and conscious experience.

This is where design becomes interesting. A room is constantly supplying information to this system: the light above you, the conversation behind you, movement in your peripheral vision, the hardness of the chair underneath you, the distance between you and another person, the position of the door, the glare on your screen, the temperature of the air, the objects scattered across your visual field. Individually, most of these things seem insignificant. Collectively, they become your environment, and your brain has to do something with all of them.

Perhaps, then, one measure of good design is not how much information we add, but how much unnecessary processing we remove. What if comfort, clarity and focus are partly the result of an environment asking less from us?

That question takes design somewhere much more interesting than taste.

When preference and physiology disagree

In 2019, during Milan Design Week, Google created an installation called A Space for Being with Muuto, Reddymade Architecture and the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University. The premise was fascinatingly simple. Visitors entered three rooms, called Essential, Vital and Transformative. Each presented a different composition of colour, furniture, lighting, texture, sound and scent.

Participants wore a specially developed wristband as they moved through the environments. It recorded physiological signals including heart activity, breathing rate, skin temperature, skin conductivity and movement. At the end, each visitor received a visual representation indicating the environment in which their physiological response suggested they felt most “at ease.”

What interests me about the project is not the idea that Google somehow discovered the formula for the perfect room. They did not. It is the possibility of a discrepancy between what we consciously think about an environment and what our bodies experience within it. You might look at one room and decide it is your favourite, while your physiological response tells a different story.

I find that gap fascinating. Because if conscious aesthetic preference and physiological response are not necessarily the same thing, “I like it” becomes a rather incomplete measure of whether a design works.

This does not eliminate subjectivity. Quite the opposite. Susan Magsamen, Executive Director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, makes an important distinction: we share human biology, yet conditioning, experiences and genetics contribute to different responses to aesthetic experiences. The objective and subjective coexist.

And perhaps this is where we have been confusing beauty with design.

So is design subjective after all?

Of course part of our experience of it is. Two people will walk into the same room and experience it differently. One person finds an exposed concrete wall calming. Another finds it cold. A deep red room might energise one person and overwhelm another. Memory, culture, expectation and individual experience make complete predictability impossible.

But this does not make design arbitrary.

There are still constraints. There is human physiology. There are patterns of attention and perception. There is ergonomics, acoustics, light, proximity, movement and context. There is also the purpose of the environment in the first place. Design operates within these conditions. We cannot reliably prescribe precisely what someone will feel, but we can shape conditions that make certain experiences more probable.

That distinction matters.

Consider the desk where you work

Imagine trying to write something difficult. Your screen faces a busy circulation route. People continuously cross your peripheral vision. Two conversations are happening behind you. Light reflects from the screen. Your phone sits beside the keyboard. Your chair requires conscious adjustment to remain comfortable.

You are still perfectly capable of working. Your brain is simply being asked to do more work before it gets to the work you care about.

Now remove some of those demands. Control the glare. Reduce competing conversations. Orient the workstation away from circulation. Move unnecessary objects outside the immediate visual field. Give the body support without requiring constant intervention. Nothing magical has happened. The environment has stopped competing quite so aggressively for your attention.

This is cognitive load made physical.

Now consider an organisation

Move from one desk to an entire workplace and the consequences become more interesting. Imagine an organisation saying collaboration matters while giving everyone spaces designed almost exclusively for individual work. Or saying concentration matters while placing focused work beside major circulation routes. Or claiming hierarchy is disappearing while executives occupy the best light, views and space behind closed doors.

The physical environment is communicating something different from the PowerPoint presentation.

People learn how an organisation works partly through what its environment makes easy, difficult, visible and inaccessible. A table shapes how people gather. A doorway determines access. Acoustics influence whether a conversation feels private. Distance changes the likelihood of an encounter. Furniture influences environmental conditioning, posture and access to movement throughout the day.

None of these things dictates behaviour. Together, however, they establish the physical conditions within which behaviour takes place.

They alter its probability.

This is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with treating workplace design as a collection of objects. We are designing conditions for behaviour.

The same thing happens around the family table

The principle becomes even clearer at home. Consider two versions of exactly the same family dinner. Same people. Same food. Same amount of time.

In the first room, the television remains in everyone’s peripheral vision. Phones sit on the table. Bright general lighting gives every object equal visual importance. People sit without a strong orientation toward one another. In the second, the table establishes a clear centre. Faces are comfortably illuminated. The television disappears from view. Phones have an obvious home elsewhere. The seating naturally places people in conversation.

Does the second room guarantee a meaningful family dinner? Of course not. Someone might still be tired. Someone might be irritated. The children might argue. Life remains life.

But something important has changed. The environment has made conversation easier and distraction less competitive. Nobody needed a sign saying “CONNECT WITH YOUR FAMILY.” The conditions changed, and a particular behaviour became more probable.

This changes the designer’s responsibility

Once you begin thinking about design this way, familiar design decisions start carrying different weight.

Material is no longer simply a question of finish. Its temperature, texture, reflectivity, acoustic properties and ageing affect how we touch, hear and experience a space. Colour is not simply a palette. It changes contrast, visual hierarchy, perceived brightness and the emotional character of an environment. Proportion determines relationships between body and space, intimacy and exposure, compression and openness. Light directs attention, reveals material and affects our biological rhythms. Acoustics determine what reaches us and what we must work to ignore.

Even beauty itself becomes more interesting when considered through this lens. The pleasure of touching something beautifully made matters. The coherence of a composition matters. The way daylight moves across a material matters. These are not indulgences sitting outside function. They form part of the sensory information through which we understand and experience our surroundings.

The designer’s responsibility, then, is not to eliminate sensory information. A perfectly neutral environment would hardly constitute a meaningful human experience. The responsibility is to understand what deserves emphasis, what should recede, and how the different signals within an environment work together.

That leads to a different set of design questions. What should this material communicate through touch? Where should the eye naturally settle? Should this space encourage intimacy or openness? Where should movement feel obvious? What deserves acoustic privacy? When should the environment stimulate us, and when should it leave us alone?

These are design decisions. They have aesthetic consequences, but they begin with human experience.

Neuroaesthetics occupies precisely this territory, examining how aesthetic experiences interact with perception, emotion, cognition and biology. The A Space for Being project made some of these otherwise invisible responses visible. It did not reduce beauty to a formula. If anything, it showed how much richer our relationship with our surroundings is than our conscious opinion of them.

The Design Truth

Every environment is already influencing something. The question is whether that influence is accidental or intentional.

A workplace influences how we concentrate and encounter one another. A home influences how we gather and withdraw. Furniture conditions our relationship with the environment, influences posture and determines how readily we move. Light influences what attracts our attention. Space influences proximity, privacy and encounter.

Design does not control these outcomes. It establishes conditions.

And when those conditions are informed by human behaviour, physiology, context and purpose, the probability of the desired experience increases.

This is why I no longer find “I like it” particularly interesting as the final judgement of design. Like and dislike belong to taste. Design has more work to do.

Beauty can be subjective.

Design cannot afford to be arbitrary.

Lach Tsvetanov
Founder and Creative Director
Studio Novo

References

Google Design, A Space for Being: Exploring Design’s Impact on Our Biology. Google’s account of the 2019 Milan Design Week installation and its exploration of neuroaesthetics, sensory environments and physiological responses.

Muuto, A Space for Being: Exploring Design’s Impact on Our Biology. Muuto’s account of the collaboration with Google, Reddymade Architecture and the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University, including the thinking behind the three multisensory environments.