Yoko Kawai’s mission is to create “Space for Well-Being”, especially in the work environment. She is one of the industry leaders in healthy buildings and serves as a research adviser to the International WELL Building Institute. Yoko cofounded Mirai Work Space Alliance to help businesses promote their employee wellbeing with a human-centric workplace design. For any business, it is a challenge to retain good employees. Often, employees are not healthy, mindful, or happy. She solves these problems by optimizing people’s workspace for their health and productivity.

To the employees and HR specialists, she offers workshops to learn helpful practical tools such as changing colors, incorporating nature and arts, switching furniture, or changing desk lights. To businesses, she offers project-based consultations to build strategies for design and engineering and to gain WELL certification.

Yoko often incorporates spatial concepts of Japan into her broad and scientifically supported knowledge of the healthy work environment. The value of Japanese space on health and mind, such as healing and mindfulness, has been well documented. She offers talks on the human centric workplace and on the contribution of Japanese concepts to it.

Yoko is a lecturer at Yale University where she has taught theories of Japanese architecture, as well as their contribution to human mind, since 2010.

Yoko is also principal of Penguin Environmental Design, based in Hamden, Connecticut, and in Osaka, Japan. Her firm focuses on incorporating landscape into architecture, often by using spatial concepts of Japan. The firm’s major works include a residential project that received a CTC&G Innovation in Design Awards in 2015, a Zen garden for Frost Valley YMCA in 2014, and a stone-scape at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2009.