NEURODESIGN® is a spatial research practice studying how architecture acts on the brain and nervous system. The eye is the fastest of the senses, but it is not the deepest: every space we enter is also heard, touched, breathed, and remembered. Each project begins with the science of that encounter, then translates it into rooms, materials, and thresholds that the body reads as calm. No detail is too small to reach the nervous system, and each one is an opportunity. Founded by Kesi Shankar.

Dithered halftone rendering of a brain seen from above, the practice's mark.
FIELDS
  • RESIDENTIAL
  • HOSPITALITY
  • WORKPLACE
  • RETAIL
  • CULTURAL SPACES
  • URBAN ENVIRONMENTS
SERVICES

  • Neuroarchitecture

    The core service: reading a space, or a set of drawings, against what is known about how environments act on the nervous system. Clients arrive with a plan that works functionally and an unease they cannot name, or with a brief that mentions wellbeing without defining it. They leave with a specific account of how the space will affect attention, stress, sleep, and recovery, and with the spatial decisions that would change those outcomes, each traced to the evidence behind it.

  • Spatial research

    Study of a particular question rather than a particular building. Clients arrive with something they need to know and no defensible way to find out: whether an open plan is costing them concentration, what a ward layout is doing to agitation, how a proposed material will read to the hand at scale. They leave with a written review of the relevant literature, a clear statement of where the evidence is strong and where it runs out, and a recommendation that survives being questioned.

  • Interior design

    Design of the interior itself, worked from the sensory conditions outward rather than the visual scheme inward. Clients arrive with a space and a set of requirements, sometimes with an architect already appointed. They leave with a scheme in which acoustics, light, material, and threshold have been resolved as a single system, with the surfaces that meet the body specified first and the decisions documented well enough that a contractor cannot quietly value-engineer the parts that matter.

  • Creative direction

    Holding a project coherent across the people delivering it. Clients arrive with an architect, a contractor, a lighting supplier, and a brand team, all competent and all optimising for different things. They leave with a defined position that every discipline can work against, and with someone answerable for whether the finished space still does what the brief said it would.

  • Strategy

    Work done before there is a design. Clients arrive with a decision to make: a site to choose, a portfolio to set standards for, a wellness claim they need to be able to defend. They leave with a written position covering what the evidence supports, what it does not, and what it would cost to build to it, in a form that can be taken to a board, a clinical director, a planning body, or an investor.

SERIES
  • THIRTY-NINE PROJECTS ON NEUROARCHITECTURE
  • PUBLISHED WEEKLY ON TIKTOK

When to work with NEURODESIGN®

NEURODESIGN® is the right fit when

  • You are designing a residential, hospitality, workplace or clinical space where occupant stress, sleep, focus or recovery is an explicit performance requirement, not a nice-to-have.
  • You need spatial decisions defended with evidence, to a board, a clinical director, a planning body or an investor, rather than justified by taste.
  • An existing space is producing a complaint you cannot diagnose: people avoid a room, a lobby reads as hostile, an open plan office is quiet but nobody can concentrate, a ward increases agitation.
  • You have an architect and an interior designer already and need a third input on the neurological brief before construction documents lock.
  • You are writing a wellness or WELL-adjacent brief and want the neuroscience claims in it to be accurate.

NEURODESIGN® is not the right fit when

  • You need construction administration, structural engineering or MEP coordination. The practice works upstream of that.
  • You want certification consulting as the deliverable. WELL and Fitwel accreditation is adjacent to this work but is not this work.
  • You need a fast decorative refresh. The research phase is the point, and it is not skippable.
  • You are looking for a large firm with staffed teams. This is a small practice.