Insights from back-to-back Still Human in Design conversations with architects and designers during the Steelcase Connecting Communities Tour: on AI, sensory intelligence, and why the physical environment matters more than ever.
"What would it look like if we invested in human intelligence as seriously as we invest in machine intelligence?"
That question, posed by experience designer Chao Dou at the start of both panel sessions, set the tone for the conversations, part provocation, and part embodied experience. Alongside interior designer Khaing Sabe (Gensler) and depth psychologist turned AI designer Jette Miller (The Pearl), Chao led architects and designers through a series of insights that felt both timely and necessary.
Chao opened with a sharp distinction: extraction economies ask how much you can give; flourishing economies ask how much you can grow. In extraction, burnout is a personal failure. In flourishing, when people leave, the system asks why. For designers, the implication is direct: are the spaces we're creating optimizing output, or building capacity? "Rest is built in and not earned," she argued. "We all deserve it simply as humans."
One of the sessions' most striking ideas came from recent research suggesting humans have at least 32 senses, not five. In a room together, we're reading temperature, micro-expressions, spatial proximity, nervous system resonance. On a video call, that collapses to two: sight and sound. With AI, it drops to zero.
Jette put it plainly: neuroscientific research shows that while people feel more creative using AI, the right brain hemisphere, where creativity, empathy, and self-reflection actually live, shows almost no activation. "AI pattern-matches on the residue of human sensing," Chao said. "It can't feel. It can only process what we've already put into words."
"When I work as a therapist, your body tells me what you really feel before your words do. AI can synthesize what humans have said about feeling. It cannot feel."
Jette Miller, The Pearl
Technology is designed to remove friction, but as Chao observed, when every trip is seamless there's no unexpected connection, no story, no opening. "When you remove every rough edge, you remove every opening." Khaing extended this into a design principle: the in-between spaces, corridors, transitions, the walk between meetings, are where mindset shifts actually happen. Her team designed a corridor that gradually dims toward a deep-focus zone, no instructions needed. "Like walking into a library," she said. "You don't need a sign to lower your voice."
Khaing's central framework asked a simple question: if design were a friend, what would it look like? Her answer: familiar, comfortable, approachable, exciting, and above all, safe. She described a project where an operations manager who'd opposed an unconventional greenhouse workspace now sits there every single day, visible in her Zoom background. The metric that moved the CEO wasn't a utilization report. It was an employee note: "I feel seen. I've never felt a space was designed for me."
"Friendship isn't one big thing, it's a million little things. Interior design is exactly the same."
Khaing Sabe, Gensler
Retail and hospitality never had to run return-to-venue campaigns after the pandemic, people couldn't wait. The workplace has to ask the same question. "What if we thought of the office as a charging station," Chao proposed, "for creative energy, social energy, collaborative energy?" That reframe changes what you design for, what you measure, and, most importantly, what you invite people to want.
Steelcase's Jason Peat closed both sessions the same way: "Design can be pragmatic, it can be scientific...and it can also be an act of care. Take one thought from today and apply it in a small way. That's where change begins."
Form. Function. And, as the panel collectively arrived at, Feelings.