Adelia Schleusz has spent over 25 years designing environments that shape how people think, feel and connect. With What If LAB, she is turning that lifetime of practice into a new kind of creative force.
Adelia Schleusz will tell you she has always been the person in the room who thinks too far out. Growing up, she heard it constantly. People called her ideas weird. They said her thinking was out there. For years, she apologized for it.
Then something shifted in her childhood. She stopped apologizing and started saying thank you.
That turning point, quiet as it sounds, sits at the heart of everything Schleusz has built. She is the founder and creative director of What If LAB, a transdisciplinary design consultancy that works at the intersection of imagination, behavioral science, neurodesign and sustainability. The firm does not simply design spaces. It challenges the assumptions behind them, asking clients and collaborators to stretch their thinking before a single decision is made.
“Imagination seems so abstract,” Schleusz says. “But over the years, implementing that creative infrastructure in every aspect of my career, it was always the catalyst to every strategy, every decision, every visioning. It never left.”
Schleusz brings decades of combined commercial interior design and applied psychology experience to her practice. She is a licensed and registered interior designer, a recognized member of the International Interior Design Association and the recipient of the Kimball International Makers of a Better Future Fund, an inaugural award that reflects precisely the kind of work she has spent her career building toward.
The name What If LAB was not chosen lightly. It came from a question she had been asking her entire life, long before she had a company to attach it to. What if design did not start with constraints? What if it started with possibility? What if every design decision was approached with systems thinking?
“The question ‘what if’ keeps the process open,” she explains. “It gives permission to think differently, to think about the future we design, courageously.”
That philosophy took tangible shape in one of her most memorable projects from her time leading design at a previous firm. The budget was tight. The vision was enormous. Her team set out to create a space that would serve as a beacon for learning, one that could project students into imagined futures and give a community something it had not yet seen. When it was finished, the building exceeded expectations and continues to bridge students’ futures.
“You can make emotive, creative, beautiful and impactful design without the assumption of a high ticket,” Schleusz says. “It just requires cross-disciplinary thinking, creative agility and really pushing forward a project that may be difficult but the right thing to do. If it’s easy, it’s probably been done before.”
The feeling she describes when walking back through a completed space, seeing whether the vision actually landed, is part of what keeps her doing this work. She calls it designing for what comes after. Not just the ribbon cutting, the finished space, or even the post occupancy evaluation, but the lasting neural experience of the person standing inside it years later.
“You feel before you see,” she says. That is not a design principle to her. It is a way of understanding what environments ask of us.
What If LAB operates as what Schleusz calls a living lab ethos and ecosystem. Rather than delivering static recommendations, the firm acts as the creative co-pilot. From an initial conversation, to an advisory partnership and deep engagement. The firm runs Imagine Workshops (the “Future Of..”), deploys pilot and prototype strategies for environments and collaborates with scientists and researchers to measure how people actually respond. “Design is neurological as much as it is emotive. I often challenge creative teams to move from just designing products or spaces that photograph well and to design spaces that feel well,” Schleusz says. Wearable technology, qualitative research and direct participant feedback can help her and her collaborators understand what is happening in the brain, not just what looks good on a rendering.
She is deliberate about drawing a clear distinction between what What If LAB does and what the market already has. Organizational psychology, business strategy, change management and design thinking all exist and she sees them as critical pieces to the whole. What she offers is something different, and she is precise about naming it.
“What If LAB is not the missing discipline in design,” she says. “It is a unique element, the connective tissue among disciplines that link imagination, research, culture and neurodesign into a coherent direction that can be executed.”
Schleusz talks about planting seeds the way some founders talk about closing deals. She knows that the ideas sparked in a conversation or a workshop may not bear fruit for months or years, and she is at peace with that. The measure of her work is not always visible, but she feels the influence of it in the conversations that happen in between. The moment a creative team realizes they have been thinking too small. The follow-up email from a leader who says, wait, I think we can actually do this.
For the next chapter of What If LAB, she is focused on building unique partnerships that allow her to show up as a creative co-pilot, someone who arrives before the drawings do and leaves teams with a new framework for how to think. She wants to work with communities, companies and collaborators who are genuinely interested in designing for generations beyond themselves.
“We’re designing futures always,” she says, “design is inherently future. We have to think in systems, how are those futures producing outcomes that will support what people will need for many years to come?”
That question, expansive and unhurried, is the same one she has been asking since she was the unique and curious kid in the room with the out-there ideas. The difference now is that people do not tell her to be quiet. They pull up a chair and ask her what do we do next.
To learn more about Adelia Schleusz and What If LAB, visit whatif-lab.com.
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