Fawn Chang

Fawn Chang, Behavioral Interior Designer and Founder of The Gentle Shift Academy, is a Color Marketing Expert, Color Strategist, and international keynote speaker who has spent 40 years designing, consulting, and teaching professionals internationally — how the spaces we live, work, heal, and gather in transform the people inside them, precognitively.

Fawn has worked with PPG since 2009 across both color marketing and IT — where her work in user experience deepened a career-long study of how people read and react to the design principles marketing already knows, applying them to the built environment and positioning her uniquely at the intersection of design and human response.

She writes and delivers the accredited Health, Safety & Welfare CEU programs (AIA and IDCEC certified) that bring the science of color and design to architects, designers, and builders worldwide, in partnership with Color Guild International and its global independent paint companies. With more than 2,500 presentations delivered across the globe, from Fairbanks to Santiago, including one broadcast live nationwide in Chile — and a track record of repeat engagements that speaks for itself — she has a rare gift for making color and design psychology approachable, practical, and immediately useful.

Fawn was the color and design expert behind a 2019 multi-state classroom study for PPG (reviewed by the RAND Corporation): in the classrooms she designed, teachers reporting that students 'pay attention in class' rose from 63% to 94%, and teachers who felt their classroom helped students learn doubled to 100%, while unpainted rooms stayed flat. She also built the Caribbean Colour Authority by engaging professionals across the many nations of the Caribbean — guiding them to forecast and trend the colors that speak the language of belonging across their richly varied cultures. A National Science Foundation project called on her gift for translating complex research into something any audience can feel and use.

Fawn's work begins from a single idea: color and design are not decoration, they are direct communication to the nervous system, and the body is the ultimate authority. She has shared this message with audiences including AIA, ASID, IDCEC, IDS West, CDECA, and CODI. Whether on stage or in a room, her aim is the same: to help designers create spaces that transform the people who live in them.