From Dance Floors to Airport Terminals: Designing for people to feel inspired

I’ve spent most of my career designing environments meant to create a feeling, not just to function, brand, or impress, but to move people emotionally.

My path in design hasn’t been linear. I came up as a photographer and set designer, working in fashion and portraiture, where every frame is built around emotion, posture, light, and what feels true in a single moment. From there, my work expanded into immersive experiences, event environments, music and dance venues, hospitality, workplaces, and residential interiors, each with wildly different constraints, but one shared responsibility: making inspirational places for people.

Over the years, through immersive installations at FOG Fair, large-scale environments for Outside Lands and Coachella, nightlife spaces like The Great Northern and Monarch, private events with designers like Stanlee Gatti, and workplace and fabrication projects through One Hat One Hand, DEKA Fabrication, and LMNL Studio, I’ve learned one consistent truth:

The best spaces don’t feel like what we expect them to be.

Great Northern Night Club, San Francisco.

When spaces lean too hard into their category, they become rigid. predictable. prescriptive. They optimize for efficiency, branding, or utility, but often forget how people actually want to feel when they’re inside them.

This is where the idea of third spaces becomes compelling yet incomplete.

We often talk about third spaces as neutral ground between home and work. But neutrality alone isn’t enough. What truly matters is inspiration. Not just a colorful, material-rich office or a cozy, functional hotel, but a stylistic narrative that takes people on a journey. A space that gives permission to slow down, open up, and imagine something more.

Third spaces are where people let their guard down. Where they linger. Where they feel permission to be expressive and be inspired. These spaces don’t tell you how to behave; they invite you in and let you decide.

Airports as the Ultimate Third Space

Few environments test human-centered design more than airports. They are high-stress, high-security, emotionally charged spaces—places of anticipation, fatigue, excitement, grief, and transition. And yet, some airports have begun to radically reshape what travel feels like by designing for people first.

Dana Hemenway’s The Color of Horizons (2020) is a suspended light sculpture in the Departure Lobby at Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport, echoing the Bay’s constantly shifting sky through woven cords, ceramics and LEDs.

San Francisco International Airport is a global leader in this shift. It is the only airport in the world formally registered as a museum, and it has redefined the experience of travel by curating rotating exhibitions, commissioning site-specific artworks, and integrating experience lounges that prioritize calm, curiosity, and cultural storytelling.

Our work at SFO gave me a front-row seat to what’s possible when art, architecture, and experience design work together.

In Terminal 2, we collaborated with curator Mickie Meng to install a custom artwork by Cathy Lu within the lounge environment, an intentional moment of pause inside the movement of the terminal. We also worked alongside artists Dana Hemingway and Leah Rosenberg, contributing to a broader ecosystem of artworks woven directly into the passenger experience.

2024 Artist Cathy Lu, Curator Micki Meng, The Club Airport Lounge

2020 Artist Dana Hemenway The Color of Horizons

2018 Leah Rosenberg Everywhere a Color

What makes SFO especially powerful is its leadership. The program, guided by the San Francisco Arts Commission, treats art not as decoration, but as infrastructure, something essential to how people experience space, time, and transition.

Beyond physical artworks, airports have embraced digital and data-driven art forms, motion-based installations and real-time systems that tell rich, evolving stories using emerging technologies. These works respond to live inputs, movement, and environmental data, making the airport feel playful rather than static.

This philosophy extends into our corporate work as well. For Chevron, we created a dynamic, ever-evolving digital artwork that merged landscape imagery from their San Ramon campus with thousands of archival photographs. The result was a living composition, an abstracted landscape made not of terrain, but of people.

The story was simple and intentional: the power of Chevron isn’t oil, gas, or electricity; it’s the people who work there.

In both cases, airports and workplaces, the lesson is the same. When you design environments that reflect human stories, people feel seen. And when people feel seen, they connect.

There’s growing evidence to support this approach. Studies consistently show that environments designed around comfort, sensory quality, and emotional well-being increase dwell time, improve mood, and strengthen social connection. In workplaces specifically, research shows that employees who feel emotionally connected to their environment report higher engagement and stronger retention. People don’t just work better in spaces that feel good; they care more.

That mindset guides everything I do, whether I’m designing a dance venue, a corporate lobby, art for an airport terminal, or a custom-fabricated installation. The question is never, “What should it look like?” It’s always, “Who is it for and how do they want to feel?”

In nightlife, that might mean softness where you expect hardness. Warmth where you expect edge. Moments of calm inside intensity.

Ripple Workplace Design in partnership with LMNL Studio.

In workplace design, it often means borrowing cues from hospitality lighting that flatters, materials that age well, and spaces that encourage collision, rest, and reflection instead of constant productivity.

In events and immersive experiences, it means understanding flow, creating opportunities to connect, relate, and feel part of a larger story. A chance to step outside routine and into inspiration.

Designing for people requires empathy before aesthetics. It requires restraint. It requires listening. And it requires letting go of the idea that design needs to announce itself to be successful.

If people stay longer than they planned, if they feel more like themselves inside a space than outside it, if they leave wanting to return, then the design has done its job.