Dr Frederik G. PferdtFrom Stanford & Google — To You

Spaces shape our emotions—whether we notice or not.

26 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt argues that designers should move beyond functional checklists to ask what emotions they want a space to create. By focusing on textures, colors, and ambience, a conference room becomes about how people feel at the table, not just how many chairs fit.

Chapters

So I think it would be the environment, the textures, the colors, looking for not just— usually when you're designing a space, even offices, okay, they call it the program. What needs to happen in this space? So it's not just what needs to happen in the space, but how do you want people to feel in the space? So it's like, okay, what has to happen in a conference room? Well, we need a place, we need 12 chairs, we need blah, blah, blah, list. But we have to turn things on its head and say also, how do we want people to feel when they're sitting at that table? Amazing. And so I think we would go about asking a different set of questions or additional set of questions in designing our spaces.