This is not a psychology textbook. It is a design book grounded in human perception, behavior, and judgment.
Design is often discussed through form, style, and visual preference. This focus obscures the deeper mechanisms that determine whether a space, object, or system truly works for the people who encounter it.
Decoding Design approaches design from a different starting point: human perception.
This book examines how judgment, taste, and meaning are formed through the interaction of biology, psychology, culture, and lived experience-and how these forces shape our response to designed environments long before conscious interpretation occurs. Rather than treating client reactions, preferences, or resistance as obstacles, it reframes them as intelligible phenomena that can be read, understood, and guided.
The first module, Reading People, Before Shaping Space, establishes the foundation of this approach. It explores why design decisions fail when they are made in isolation from human experience, and how designers can regain clarity and authority by learning to read people before arranging form, material, or function.
Drawing on professional practice, academic teaching, and interdisciplinary research-including environmental psychology and cognitive science-this work provides a conceptual structure for:
- Understanding client judgment beyond subjective taste
- Distinguishing opinion from informed decision-making
- Designing spaces and systems that align form, function, and meaning
- Communicating design intent with confidence and authority
This is not a manual of techniques or a catalogue of styles.
It is a framework for thinking-intended for designers, architects, creative professionals, and anyone interested in how human perception shapes the built and designed world.
Decoding Design is published as a modular work. Each module can be read independently, while collectively forming a coherent system for understanding judgment, meaning, and spatial thinking in design.
Book is also available on Gumroad: https://decodingdesign.gumroad.com/l/ReadingPeopleBeforeShapingSpace
