The latest issue of HOK Forward, our annual look at ideas shaping the built environment, is now live. The 2026 edition picks up where Kay Sargent’s Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces (Wiley, 2025) left off, turning to neuroaesthetics: the study of how our brains respond to art, beauty and the built world around us.
Spaces aren’t passive backdrops. They are active agents in human health and well-being. The design decisions we make shape how people feel and function inside a room before conscious thought catches up. Wired for Beauty argues that those responses are shaped by biology, culture and individual cognition, that designers are already influencing them whether they intend to or not, and that the science is now clear enough to design with intention.
“Design isn’t an aesthetic choice. It’s a biological intervention,” says Kay Sargent, HOK’s director of thought leadership for Interiors. “Spaces are already acting on the people inside them. As designers, we need to be more intentional about what we’re asking those spaces to do.”
In the following video, Sargent introduces the fundamentals of neuroaesthetic design and walks through how color, light, spatial relationships and materiality shape emotion, comfort and behavior.
HOK Forward 2026 is organized into five chapters:
Chapter 1: Beauty as a Biological Necessity
This chapter establishes the science behind neuroaesthetics and the shift from treating the brain as an isolated computer to understanding mind, body and environment as one continuous system.
Chapter 2: The Tools That Shape Experience
A look at the Neuro-Architecture Triad—coherence, fascination and hominess—and the design tools that bring it to life across project types.
Chapter 3: Design in Action
Kay Sargent introduces the fundamentals of neuroaesthetic design and shows, through HOK projects, how color, light, spatial relationships and materiality shape emotion, comfort and behavior.
Chapter 4: A Conversation with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee
HOK sits down with the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics to discuss beauty, the brain and the built environment. The conversation covers where the science is solid, where it’s still emerging and what designers should do in the meantime.
Chapter 5: Designing with Intention: Our Process
An eight-step framework for putting neuroaesthetic thinking into practice, mapped across the phases of a project from proposal through post-occupancy.
Explore the full issue of HOK Forward.