“You want enough to keep you growing, but not so much that it throws you completely out of kilter.” ~ Leidy Klotz

Have you ever noticed how much a space influences how you feel? How a place can put you “in a good place”…or not?

That makes me wonder: how might we design and inhabit spaces that make choosing curiosity easier?

Leidy Klotz joins me to talk about the inseparability of our inner and outer worlds – and the impact technology is having on this foundational part of ourselves.

He offers tips (what I would call curiosity practices, of course) to navigate the spaces around us, both making the best of them and feeding the best in us.

Physical spaces are, by their nature, static — so you just think of your relationship with them as static, but obviously it’s not. If we can break out of that mindset, that’s a huge benefit for everybody.

We talked about our needs for agency, growth and connection; appreciating spaces that entice and encourage uncertainty; the unintended consequences of industrial efficiency; seeking adjacent freedoms; being a space archeologist; intrepid presence; novelty and nostalgia; noticing — and what’s to be learned from building sand castles.

Listen to Ep. #327: In a Good Place, with Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia. He studies how and why humans design. His latest book, In a Good Place: How the Places Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive, is a masterful distillation of a host of rich curiosity enterprises.

Check out my previous conversation with Leidy, built around his book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.

Enjoy my conversations with David Pearl, founder of StreetWisdom and the World Wide Wander and with Menka Sanghvi, of Just Looking. I was delighted to learn I played some small part in their finding their way into Leidy’s book!

Think more about place-making with these C2BC Classics: Placemaking, with Graham Coreil-Allen; Public Art Is a Curiosity Practice; and There Are Clues Everywhere, with Amber Wiley.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Discovery Harbor” by Cloud Harbor, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.