Welcome to Mind in Space. This is where I publish my thinking on spatial psychology, the science of place and the relationship between the built environment and human experience. It is a platform for essays, thoughts, research and ideas at the intersection of cognitive science, spatial design and the psychology of everyday life.
I am Sarah L Taylor, a spatial psychologist based between Barcelona and London. For two decades I practised as an architectural designer, delivering hundreds of projects across residential, hospitality and commercial sectors in Spain and the UK. The more I developed for clients, the more I came to understand that the metrics which dominate project delivery; cost, timelines and compliance, overshadowed the question of what it actually means to design space for human beings.
That question became the centre of my work. I grew fascinated by the way spaces affect the people inside them: the feelings they provoke, the behaviours they produce, the degree to which they support or undermine performance and thought. The same space impacts different people in different ways, and that comes down to each individual's accumulated experience of place, their memories, associations and sensory history.
I took the opportunity to deepen my academic research in environmental psychology and neuroarchitecture, and from that developed a series of proprietary methodologies for correlating spatial conditions with human behaviour and experience, organised within a framework called ALIGN. This process helps spatial decision-makers improve and rethink the way they design. It supports individuals in understanding why they respond the way they do to specific environments and suggests how to reconfigure those environments to create the conditions for clearer thinking and better performance.
I now work with architects and designers seeking deeper insight into the people they are designing for, with brands building product narratives through creative collaboration, with founders and executives who need their physical environments to support the quality of their thinking and with decision-makers working at the scale of city planning, development and experience design.
If you are interested in working together, you can find out more at www.sarahltaylor.com