By: Natalie Johnson

What if the workplace were not a building at all? What if it was an experience, something that could exist in a temporary lab, a digital environment, a spaceship on its way to the moon or a team collaborating across continents from their homes?

The conversation around the future of work is often dominated by technology. Artificial intelligence, automation, and data infrastructure take center stage, while the human nervous system is treated as an afterthought. Adelia Schleusz believes this is a fundamental mistake.

As the Founder and Creative Director of What If LAB, Schleusz operates at the intersection of design, science, and psychology. Her work is grounded in a simple premise. Environments are not neutral. They shape cognition, behavior, decision-making, and long-term brain health. If organizations want to build truly future-ready systems, they must start by understanding how the human brain interacts with space.

For Schleusz, the workplace is not simply an office. It is any environment where people gather, physically or digitally, to think, collaborate, experiment, or solve problems. A workplace might be a corporate headquarters, a pop-up innovation lab, a virtual environment or a temporary space designed for creative collaboration.

This broader definition reframes how organizations think about design. If work can happen anywhere, the environments supporting that work must be intentionally designed for the way the human brain actually functions.

This is where neurodesign enters the conversation, not as a buzzword but as a strategic lens.

What Neurodesign Actually Means

Neurodesign is often confused with aesthetics or wellness trends. Schleusz is careful to define it more precisely.

At its core, neurodesign examines how humans process information through their environments. Light, sound, temperature, spatial layout, materiality, color, and sensory input all shape how the brain focuses, regulates emotion, and manages cognitive load.

While these principles apply to any setting, Schleusz emphasizes that neurodesign becomes especially critical in environments where people are expected to think creatively, collaborate, and adapt quickly.

“In many ways, neurodesign can feel synonymous with interior design, leveraging art and science to create environments that work with our brains,” she notes, “but it goes deeper into the science behind why these elements matter and how they can be tested.”

The distinction matters. Neurodesign is not just about preference. It is about understanding and testing how environments influence the brain in measurable ways.

From Static Spaces to Living Labs

What differentiates Schleusz’s approach is how theory is translated into practice. Rather than delivering static recommendations, What If LAB operates as a living lab model. The work unfolds in phases, beginning not with solutions but with experimentation.

That evolution reflects a deliberate shift in her own practice.

“I have had the privilege of working with clients and teams across the globe and across market sectors, typically designing adaptable but permanent design solutions. It’s exciting to now be focused on reimagining experiences and testing innovation in flexible, ‘living’ ecosystems.”

The first step is identifying individuals and creative teams already with the appetite for innovation. Leaders willing to question assumptions. Teams are open to positive disruption.

“You want stakeholders that are engaged and excited about this kind of thinking,” Schleusz says. “You want people who want to be there, where innovation becomes behavior.”

From there, Imagine Workshops create a shared foundation. Participants are guided through imagination and strategic foresight exercises that stretch thinking far beyond immediate constraints.

Instead of starting with a traditional office layout or a predetermined solution, the process begins with speculative questions. What if the workplace could influence our creative capacity? What if teams collaborated from entirely different physical spaces but shared the same sensory experience? What if a workplace functioned more like an evolving ecosystem than a fixed location?

Neurodesign principles are introduced as lived experiences, not abstract concepts. The workshops function as both education and experimentation.

Phase two in this example then moves into experimentation, piloted environments. Temporary pop-ups designed for different work modes, deep focus, collaboration, recovery, and sensory regulation are deployed and tested. These environments are not speculative. They are measured.

Wearable technology and qualitative research can be used to gather data on brain interaction, stress response, and cognitive engagement. Participants co-create the process, generating insights they can apply immediately within their organizations.

“The goal is learning by doing,” Schleusz explains.

Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All

A common critique of workplace design is its tendency toward uniformity. Schleusz sees this as incompatible with human reality. Neurodesign, by definition, must account for neurodiversity.

“Everyone needs a sense of choice,” she says. Some individuals need quiet and low stimulation. Others thrive in dynamic environments. Inclusive neurodesign creates multisensory ecosystems that allow people to self-regulate based on their needs at that moment.

This is not about personalization for its own sake but instead cognitive equity. “Let’s think about it, Interior Designers are designing futures for five to even six generations now in the workplace,” Schleusz said. When environments offer flexibility, they support how people work, focus and collaborate across diverse populations.

“Designing for humans means designing for difference,” Schleusz notes.

Leadership, Cognition, and the AI Era

As organizations adopt advanced technologies, Schleusz argues that leadership adaptability and cognitive engagement have become strategic priorities. Neurodesign offers a framework for understanding how environments influence thinking and adaptability during periods of constant change.

“AI transformation puts enormous pressure on leaders,” she explains. “How they think, how they make decisions, how they recover, all of that matters.”

In her work with cities, corporations and innovation teams, Schleusz integrates neurodesign into leadership development.

When leaders rethink the environments where thinking happens, whether those environments are physical, digital or hybrid, they begin to see workplace design less as a passive backdrop and more as an active cognitive system.

Designing spaces that support focus, reflection and creative agility becomes a form of infrastructure.

This framing positions imagination not as a soft skill but as a competitive advantage. Schleusz describes it as “imagination as infrastructure,” a system organizations must intentionally build if they want to augment human intelligence rather than replace it.

A Transdisciplinary Model for the Future

What If LAB’s team structure mirrors its philosophy? Rather than assembling narrow specialists, Schleusz curates transdisciplinary collaborators whose expertise overlaps in intentional ways, from researchers who understand design to neurodesigners with anthropological training and innovation strategists with backgrounds in AI, biotechnology, and immersive design.

“No one design company will typically have all of these intersections of expertise at a given time,” she says. “But by reimagining what a team is today, we can build teams centered on talent of the future.” We are entering a new era of the labor market, where entire career paths are prototyped in real time.

The model enables teams to move beyond the problem at hand. It also prevents siloed thinking, which Schleusz sees as one of the biggest barriers to innovation. Collaboration is not hierarchical. It is relational and adaptable. “The competitive edge for talent shifts to those that can continuously unlearn, reconfigure, and redeploy their skills against new problems,” Schleusz says.

Importantly, genuine collaboration is voluntary. Team members engage because they are aligned with shared values to tackle complex problems. Human-centered posture, ethical responsibility and regenerative thinking for people and planet.

Designing With Intention and Urgency

Design, Schleusz reminds us, is always an act of shaping the future. Every environment shapes behavior over time. Neurodesign introduces accountability by examining how design decisions connect to attention, focus, and engagement.

As our environments continue to evolve, the question is no longer whether design influences performance. The question is, what if we stop optimizing the old models and step into designing what’s next?

Schleusz’s work suggests a reframing of design innovation itself. Not as a race toward efficiency but as a practice of care for cognition, culture, and the humans who will inherit the systems being built today.

Neurodesign, in Schleusz’s work, becomes a way to see, test and take responsibility for how environments actively participate in human cognition. A powerful reminder. The most advanced technology shaping the future of work is still the human mind.

If this invites you to think differently, you’re already in the work. To learn more about Adelia Schleusz and What If LAB, visit whatif-lab.com.