What Beautiful Spaces Do to Ideas

I'm leaning against the worktop in my kitchen at 9 AM, waiting for the milk to heat in the Aeroccino, scrolling through conference photos tagged with #dh2025 on Mastodon. The first one makes me put the phone down immediately. Something about the angle—all those heads bent forward, the artificial glare, the way the presenter looks tiny against that massive screen of PowerPoint slides. My stomach does this thing it always does when I see spaces designed to make humans smaller.

The Aeroccino whirs and steams. The milk will be perfect for hot cocoa in a minute. I pick up the phone again, scroll through more photos. University lecture halls, convention centers, seminar rooms. All the places where minds are supposed to meet but somehow never do.

There's this feeling I get in those spaces that I've never been able to name properly. Like being slowly drained of something essential. Like my thoughts are being processed through machinery that doesn't quite fit how thinking actually works.

In spring I was at a conference—the usual setup, about fifty people facing forward, presenter clicking through slides about digital storytelling. Brilliant work, really. But fifteen minutes in I noticed I was reading the fire exit signs instead of listening. My mind had gone somewhere else entirely, anywhere else, just to escape the relentless sameness of it all.

The presenter was talking about narrative immersion while we sat in the least immersive environment imaginable—or so it felt. Rows of people staring at screens, nobody looking at each other, some peaking furtively at their smartphones, probably because they have learned to be ashamed of not paying attention, and for most I couldn't even tell if they're awake or just very good at looking attentive.

During the break I walked outside just to remember what weather felt like. The relief was immediate and total. My shoulders dropped. My breathing changed. I could think again.

That's when I started wondering again about the relationship between space and thought—this thought comes to be often during conferences. How certain environments seem to support the kind of attention that makes ideas possible, while others—most academic spaces really nowadays—seem designed to prevent it entirely.

I think about the places where my best thinking happens. Never conference rooms. Never lecture halls. Never faculty meetings. Never anywhere that sounds and looks like a dentist's office having an argument (or a love affair?) with a shopping mall.

That house in Norway where I spent a week last autumn, perched above a fjord in the Hardanger region. Wooden floors worn smooth by generations of feet. Windows that opened onto air so clean it hurt to breathe. Light that kept changing on the water, making the mountains look closer sometimes, farther away other times. The house itself seemed to breathe with the weather—expanding and contracting with temperature changes I could feel in the floorboards under my feet.

I was trying to write something about virtual photography but kept getting distracted by how the light moved, how my thinking changed when clouds passed across the sun. My mind worked differently there. More patiently. More willing to circle around ideas rather than march toward conclusions.

Or this bookshop in Cecil Court where I spent an afternoon reading while cats wandered between the shelves. The owner made tea without being asked, let me stay past closing time because I was clearly lost in something. The presence of living things, the smell of old paper, the way light filtered through dust and fur and possibility—ideas took on weight and at the same time weightlessness when they were surrounded by all that aliveness.

I spent an entire afternoon there reading about camera angles and presence, but what I remember most is how the space itself felt present. How it seemed to hold all the reading that had ever happened there, all the thinking, all the discoveries made in the circle of light cast by those green lamps.

The ideas I had that day were unusual. More connected to something larger than my own research endeavour. More willing to be uncertain about their own conclusions.

But academic conferences take place in spaces that seem designed to eliminate uncertainty. To process ideas through standardised formats until they're safe enough to be efficiently transmitted from one brain to another.

The lecture hall where I sat through that digital storytelling presentation could have been anywhere. Frankfurt or Phoenix or Manila—they all have the same grey carpet, the same adjustable lighting, the same modular walls that can be configured to hold any number of bodies in any arrangement that maximises capacity.

These spaces exist nowhere in particular, which means they exist nowhere at all. They're designed to be neutral, but neutrality applied to human environments becomes its own kind of violence.

I keep thinking about a conversation I had with someone at a pub near Newcastle a couple of months ago. We were sitting in the outside seating area where you could hear the sea in the distance, evening light fading, the sound of waves mixing with the usual pub noise. He still had flour on his jumper from baking brioche that morning, smelled faintly of yeast and butter.

He was telling me about beauty and attention, how he'd been thinking about why certain spaces make his mind work differently than others. Not someone who works in academia—he bakes bread for a living, plays games, thinks about mortality and consequence in ways that don't fit into any disciplinary framework I know.

"I think beauty is actually technology," he said, hands moving as he talked. "Not decoration. A way of making the mind more receptive to what it's trying to understand."

The sea breeze carried the smell of salt and seaweed. Our table wobbled slightly whenever either of us leaned forward. The conversation kept changing direction—from bread-making to virtual death to his father's funeral to whether rogue-likes can teach us about letting go.

His insight about beauty-as-technology made me pause mid-sip of my pint. The smell of chips and vinegar mixed with the way the evening light made everything look softer and the sound of gulls arguing over something in the distance, and instead of immediately thinking about how to use this idea professionally—what paper I could cite it in, which conference panel it might fit —I just let it sit there. In a conference room, I would have been mentally filing it away, already half-composing the email I'd send myself later to remind myself of the gravitas of it all. Here, with the easy rhythm of pub conversation around us, the idea didn't need to become anything else.

I wanted to ask him more questions but we got distracted by someone's dog wandering over, then by the server offering another round, then by the way the last light was reflecting off the water in the distance, making the whole evening feel like a stage set for some play about the history of human attention.

The conversation never really ended, just dissolved into the larger flow of the evening. But I've been thinking about it ever since. About what it means to design spaces that support rather than undermine the conditions that make thinking possible.

Academic conferences operate on the assumption that thinking is a purely mental activity that can happen anywhere, in any environment, as long as the information being transmitted is sufficiently rigorous. But what if thinking is actually more like gardening—dependent on soil conditions, weather, the particular quality of light and air and time that allows ideas to take root and grow?

I remember the first time I presented at a major conference. I'd spent months preparing, crafting every sentence to be both precise and memorable. But when I got up to speak, something about the environment—the harsh lights, the sea of faces I couldn't really see, the knowledge that every word was being evaluated by people whose approval I needed for my career—made my carefully prepared thoughts feel brittle and false.

I heard myself speaking but it didn't sound like my voice. It sounded like someone performing the idea of scholarship rather than actually thinking about the questions that had originally excited me.

The Q&A was worse. Someone asked about my methodology and I found myself defending choices I'd made months earlier, explaining things that had felt obvious when I was working alone in my office but suddenly seemed arbitrary under institutional fluorescents.

Walking back to my hotel afterward, I felt like I'd lost something vital. Not just confidence, but connection to the ideas themselves. The conference had processed my thinking through formats that changed its shape, made it fit containers that weren't designed for the kind of messy, personal, still-developing thoughts that actually drive my research.

I think about the difference between that experience and the pub conversation about beauty and attention. How the baker's insight about beauty-as-technology emerged from and returned to the sensory richness of the moment we were sharing. How the environment participated in the thinking rather than working against it.

Maybe that's what I'm really missing in academic spaces and events. Not just comfort or aesthetic pleasure, but the recognition that consciousness is always embodied, always situated, always dependent on the particular conditions that allow attention to flourish.

The conference photos keep appearing on my timeline. I've started closing them immediately, but sometimes I pause long enough to wonder what would happen if we changed where and how we meet. In spaces that remember they're designed for human beings rather than information processing systems.

Rooms with windows that open. Furniture that's been touched by time rather than designed for maximum efficiency. Places where you can hear the world outside, where natural light reminds you that thinking happens in time, that ideas develop according to rhythms that can't be scheduled or optimised.

I imagine academic conversations happening in gardens, in libraries with green lamps, in kitchens where bread is rising and coffee is brewing and the smell of human habitation makes ideas feel more connected to the life that actually generated them.

But I don't know if that's naive. Maybe the sterile efficiency of conference venues is what allows hundreds of people to gather from around the world to share their work. Maybe the elimination of sensory distraction is what lets us focus on the purity of ideas rather than the accidents of environment.

Or maybe we've convinced ourselves that thinking is pure when it's actually always contaminated by the conditions that make it possible. Maybe the accidents are the point.

The cocoa is ready now. The morning light has shifted across the desk in my living room, changing the mood without me having to adjust anything. I can hear people beginning their day, the sound of my neighbours starting their cars, the distant hum of a world that's very much present and alive.

I finish scrolling through the conference photos. Close the browser. Open my laptop to write something that doesn't have to fit into a twenty-minute presentation slot or justify its existence to a room full of people I can't see.

The ideas come more easily here, in this space that knows it's designed for human habitation rather than information transfer. They develop according to their own logic rather than the logic of institutional scheduling. They're willing to be uncertain about their own conclusions.

Maybe that's enough.

The recognition that thinking happens in places where cats sleep on poetry shelves and flour lingers on jumpers and light moves across water while you watch. That consciousness needs particular conditions to flourish. That the spaces we gather in shape the thoughts we're able to have in ways we're only beginning to understand.

The baker was right about beauty being technology. Not decoration, but the particular arrangement of light and air and time that allows the mind to become receptive to what it's trying to understand.

I just wish more academic spaces thought like that.

Image: © Victoria Mummelthei rabbitingyears