There may be only three kinds of spaces. Those that are absolutely terrific, and they are very rare. Then there are those that are just plain vanilla, and that's most of the time. And then, there are those that just completely suck. I mean, they even hurt, they are so bad. They make you get really angry.
If you want to hone your skills in judging what’s around you, you may want to start with the last example. Go with the most offensive case first. The more extreme, the better. Deal with the successful spaces last, it may be easier to work backwards.
Find that really insultingly lousy space. Ask yourself, "What is that just drives me nuts about this space?" Analyze it, as cold bloodily as you can. Now, you’re not analyzing the space itself, your analyzing your reaction to the space. It's your emotions, your thoughts, what you are physically feeling, that matters. How are these things coming at me? I’m hurting now. Why am I hurting? How does it hurt? When did it start? When will it end? Why is this thing pulling my attention away from myself?
You may then ask yourself, almost immediately, “Who the hell is in charge here? How did this thing ever happen? What SOB did this to me? What's his name and what does he look like?” Be outraged. This stuff happens to us all the time, but we never seem to think we have the right to deal with it.
My point is that if you just jot down your thoughts, note what it is that drives you nuts about something (and believe me, there’s an endless variety of offensive spaces out there to draw from), you'll come up with a set of observations that will lead you, working backwards, to a better understanding of the really good.
Forget about talent. You don’t have to design the solution, but you can be a reasonable, sophisticated judge of your own environment. And that's what I'm asking you to do here. Stop, pause, and collect your own reactions to what's in front of you, of what you are passing through. and then apply that to your criticism and make the necessary changes. Right now, you only need to understand the problem. You have to feel the question, “Why is this happening to me?” and realize you are not the cause of your distress. Someone else is.