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Your environment is not a background. It is taking part in your day, every hour, whether anyone designed it that way or not.
For twenty years Etienny Trindade sat in meetings about how many people fit, what equipment was needed and what the budget allowed, and asked a question nobody else was asking: how do you want people to feel in here? For most of those twenty years, people looked at her as though she had changed the subject.
In this episode she tells you where this work came from. The interior design shop she started in at seventeen in Brazil. The evening an office air conditioner switched off at half past six and ten people exhaled at the same moment, after eight hours of saying nothing. Finding out later in life that she is autistic, and realising the sensitivity she had treated as separate from her work was the reason the work was good.
And why her why has changed. She is no longer trying to prove a different way is possible. She wants people to know it already exists.
In this episode you will learn
- Why a space can meet every requirement on paper and still exhaust the people inside it
- What the environment is taking from you before you begin your work
- Why designing for the person who finds a place hardest makes it better for everybody
- What happened in a research hub when the light, the colour and the kitchen changed
- Why awareness, not proof, is the point of this work
- The one thing to do tonight when you walk through your door
Start by noticing
You do not need to be a designer to begin. Tonight, walk in and notice how you feel. Notice where you naturally want to sit, and where you find yourself getting irritated or distracted. Change nothing. Just become curious. Awareness changes the questions you ask, and better questions lead to better decisions.
This episode answers
- Why does my workspace feel draining when nothing is wrong with it?
- What does it mean to design for a nervous system?
- How does being autistic change how someone reads a space?
- Why do accessible and sensory aware spaces work better for everyone?
About the host
Etienny Trindade is the founder of Spatial Nervous System Design, with twenty years in architecture and interiors, author of Creating Healing Spaces for Children, and award winning creator of learning environments for neurodivergent children. She hosts Never Neutral, the only podcast at the intersection of environmental design, neuroaesthetics and nervous system science.
Remember. It is not about perfection. It is about one conscious choice at a time.
Find me here: https://happyhealthyhomes.au/
Apply to work with me: https://happyhealthyhomes.au/founders
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