PROCLIVITY?!?

I belly laughed at the use of that term.

I'm a trial & error guru.
Well, I teach yoga and am a much better guru at that than I am designing, but I know color, symmetry, and visual peace. (I'm still laughing.)

I would love to know how the "layout gurus" came to be, too. Professional cooks? Multiple remodels?

Do tell.

At small, low-to-moderate budget kitchens. Rooms where little to no expansion into other rooms is feasible (or possible). Kitchens that don't meet all the guidelines because they can't. The kitchen in the first place I owned was 5.5 x 7 feet with a 6'7" ceiling and I wanted a full sized cooking appliance.

I got my design degree after this. At the time I was doing patient based clinical research and I was a blinded examiner. I measured things to 0.5 mm using a 1mm scale, and if repeated measurements started to skew in reproducibility I had to be recalibrated. So I look at inches as if they are gigantic. I regularly butt heads with the actual gurus because I have a different frame of reference.

Way back years ago when I was in college, we did a basic psychology course that exposed us to the many different types of intelligence testing. One of them involved spatial relationship puzzles. I could "see" exactly what those parts and pieces actually were, and it was just a matter of arranging them in the right order until everything clicked and other people saw the relationship also. We also took the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory, and I came out an INT borderline J to P. INT's love puzzles and thinking.

A career was born.

I'm not a guru but what I can do is follow traffic patterns in a kitchen, identify issues and pick out problems. What I don't have is the imagination (actually patience is probably more true) to re-do a floor plan. I can do it because it's the way my brain works - very analytical spatially.

(I was a property underwriter in a past life - very analytical and always looking for problems that need to be addressed for the risk to be acceptable.)

Ooo -- I worried this was an eye-rolling stupid question. But it's yielded some great stuff so far! Even, giving good belly-laughs (very healthy for you, as I'm sure you know) :)

To answer your question, no. Absolutely not. I don't have that spatial visualization capacity (or proclivity, if you will), at all. But I have a really good friend who does, and I use her all the time. I am more like Christine, a trial and error kind of person. But I am a good problem solver, which unfortunaely, doesn't help much on this forum. In fact, I often feel really lame offering anything at all (and here I am, doing it anyway). But I really learn a great deal from everyone. I love my kitchen and it's probably the best layoout we could have come up with, but I often wonder what the layout gurus here would have done with it if I had known about this forum beforehand.

Isn't the OP a little like asking, "What is it like to be so beautiful?" and then seeing who responds?

I certainly do NOT count myself as good at layouts. Quite the opposite. However, I view layout threads as an exercise. In fact, I think that there is a whole graduate curriculum in design here for the ambitious.

I have often opened a layout thread with a desire to school myself, but given up in despair. I salute and appreciate the gurus!