Elisabeth Mejia is Vice President and Office Design Leader, Interiors, at HKS in New York, working across healthcare, hospitality, financial services, and technology. Her practice runs on one conviction, which she calls Return on Emotion: that what a space makes people feel matters as much as how it looks. She teaches in a graduate healthcare design studio at the New York School of Interior Design and has taken the idea to the NeoCon stage. She recently completed a term as President of IIDA’s New York chapter. Here are the five things sparking her imagination right now:

Designing the Pause

In Sweden, Mejia fell for fika, the daily ritual of stopping for coffee and company. What held her was not the drink but the pause itself, a deliberate break in a day that otherwise runs on momentum. She has been thinking about how to build that permission to stop into the spaces she designs, rather than just moving people through them.

Emotional Architecture

Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain undoes Mejia every time. Its pas de deux tightens into control, then releases into stillness between two dancers, set to the spare piano line of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. What she chases is that arc: not spectacle but restraint, tension held long enough that letting go means something. It is what she reaches for in her own work.

Objects That Hold Memory

A green ceramic bowl sits on Mejia’s counter, found by her mother at a Berkshires artist market. It holds fruit and gets used daily, and every glance at it returns her to that afternoon. She likes objects that carry a memory without being precious about it, beautiful and ordinary at once.

Community as a Design Project

With Robin Reigi, Mejia built the Student Uplift Program at IIDA NY to close a real gap between students, emerging designers, and the industry. Watching it grow, students landing internships, arriving with questions, finding a community of their own, has been among the most meaningful parts of her chapter work. Proof, she says, that community can be designed as deliberately as any building.

The Case for Play

Mejia is chasing play lately. A restroom hook shaped like a tiny brass hand, unnecessary and delightful, is exactly the kind of thing she wants more of: a small permission to surprise someone, to let a space make a person smile for no functional reason at all.

Mejia is the second designer to take the column. Gensler’s Todd Heiser went first.

ABOUT: Current Obsessions is a 3rings column where we invite leading designers to share what’s sparking their imagination right now. Each feature offers a glimpse into the ideas, places, and inspirations shaping the way they think about design today. Want to be featured or nominate someone? Please contact us.