Need a Chicken. Got a Chicken: Why Human-Centered Design Is More Complex Than It Looks

How do you bring empathy, listening and iteration into projects built for real people? In this episode of the Design-Build Delivers Podcast, Erin Looney talks with Deb Sheehan and Susan O’Connell about the realities, challenges, and opportunities of applying Human-Centered Design within design-build delivery. Expect stories from healthcare, higher ed, and civic projects where user feedback, prototyping, and adaptability shape outcomes.

Guests:

• Deb Sheehan, ACHE, LEED AP, EDAC, DBIA — Healthcare Core Market Leader at DPR Construction, oversight of $9.5B+ in projects, board roles, evidence-based design leader. 
• Susan O’Connell, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, DBIA — Managing Principal at AC Martin, 35+ years in complex projects across civic, aviation, higher ed; skilled in integrating input and leading multidisciplinary teams. 

Topics Covered:

• What “human-centered design” really means (vs buzzword)
• Tools and techniques: prototyping, mockups, user feedback, iteration
• Project case stories: real challenges in healthcare, campus, civic spaces
• Balancing cost, schedule and human experience
• The role of awards, standards and industry leadership
• What’s next: housing, AI, cross-discipline integration

Resources & References:

• DBIA Design-Build Done Right® Best Practices
• DBIA Design Excellence Position Statement
• DBIA Project/Team Awards
• DBIA Conference & Expo 2025 (Las Vegas)
• How Design-Build is Shaping the Future of Healthcare, Part 1
• How Design-Build is Shaping the Future of Healthcare, Part 2

Access all our free design-build resources and learn more about Design-Build Done Right® at dbia.org.

DBIA members are shaping the future, one successful collaboration at a time. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Erin Looney  00:00

Aaron, designing for people isn't always as simple as it sounds. What feels intuitive often turns out to be complex, messy and deeply rewarding. This is the design build delivers podcast brought to you by Archons. I am your host. Erin Mooney from the DBIA national headquarters in Washington, DC. This episode is all about human centered design, despite the weird title of the episode, which will make total sense if you stick around, if you don't, well, then may your dreams be haunted by chickens. Our guests are both DBIA national board members. Deb Sheehan is the healthcare core market leader at DPR construction. She brings decades of experience leading more than $9.5 billion in built environment projects. Susan O'Connell, managing principal at AC Martin, has more than 35 years guiding multi disciplinary teams in higher education, civic aviation and K through 14 markets. So what does human centered design really mean? Why is it more than a buzzword, and how does it show up in real world design build projects? Well, Deb and Susan are going to share the answers to those questions, as well as how empathy, inclusive design and user feedback shape everything from trauma rooms to classrooms together, Deb and Susan share stories from healthcare, from higher education and from civic spaces that reveal how human centered design not only solves problems, but also creates environments where people feel welcomed, supported and prepared for what's next, whatever that might be. I also spoke with Deb earlier this year, alongside Barbara Wagner for our series on healthcare and design build, a two parter on the design build delivers blog. While this episode covers different ground, those insights really are a great lead in human centered design. At first, sounds self explanatory human centered design, but after talking with you both in our planning call and doing some of the research to set up this episode, I learned it's not that simple. It's not so self explanatory. So before we get into Human Centered Design and Action, let's kick things off by defining

Deb Sheehan  02:10

it. When we think about human centered design, I think we'll start with that foundation, then certainly lean in on Susan to talk about and expound on that a bit more in the design, build, delivery model, but at its core, it's an approach to problem solving that puts people at the absolute center of what we're designing and at the heart of the process. So that part's probably intuitive. It begins with a great deal of empathy, but I think what I have found in applying human centered design is the process really goes through a pretty methodical Stage Gate. You start with generating a lot of ideas. You certainly can do rapid prototyping in that you also have the opportunity again, this is where the empathy leans in to share those prototypes and adapt with the folks that are actually going to inherit and utilize the space. And then it allows more clarity, I think, in conviction and decisions that are made as to what to build. It's an iterative practice, but it certainly takes and makes the feedback of users kind of at its central, critical part of how a solution is evolving. You know, I work largely in healthcare, but I find by validating that refining and improving the work, we can discover real root causes and not just treat the problems of the day. I think, as all of us have experienced, if you work in institutional work, the gestation of these projects can be anywhere from six to 12 years long. So what you don't want to do is just replicate today's challenges. You have to, at the same time, ideate and bring innovation forward so that you are really looking at root cause analysis that's going to inform solutions that endure for decades to come. Susan, do you want to expand a little bit more? I know you come at it from a different lens, with higher ed, with

Susan O'Connell  03:51

institutional kind of higher ed and civic and government, those three users are really typical early adopters. So human centered design is kind of like the way we listen very carefully to our users, but I would say it has morphed, again pretty considerably in the last six or eight years into a kind of inclusive design. So not only are we designing for those humans, looking at what they do very carefully, watching how they inhabit space, but we're kind of validating the idea that all the humans are different, whether they're students coming to University, Faculty Teaching with different pedagogies, or people who are working in government and civic buildings. So it's really about inviting people into the Civic and government buildings and making sure they are feeling welcome. And part of the process in higher education, it's about reaching out to all of the students on campus despite their background or age, and making sure that the buildings, classroom, student housing is appropriate for where they come from. And we do it. Lot by listening and asking lots of questions and then trying things out on them and a lot of fun to show students pictures of things and ask them, would you feel welcome in that building? You get a lot of information about what makes them feel good and accepted and wanted in a space.

Erin Looney  05:20

Susan, you were talking a little there about early adopters, and then you talked about inclusive design. And I have a background in higher ed, so I automatically think of students as fitting both of these parts of the discussion, that they tend to be pretty early adopters in a lot of cases, and they're keenly aware of the need for spaces to be inclusive for things they do to include the variety of human conditions and situations and circumstances. And I also found human centered design often gets framed in terms of those users, of course, and so it makes it kind of an easy fit. So when you're building spaces where you can clearly see the end user, making those spaces fit is, I don't want to say a no brainer, because it's certainly not but it seems a little easier to bridge that. But human centered design, you know it, as you've said, it's really about accessibility. It's about livability for everyone, not just that traditional who you would expect to be in that space. How do you see design build projects, adapting to support not just that average user, not just the student you expect to want things to be new and interesting, but that full spectrum of people who interact with these spaces,

Susan O'Connell  06:29

design build projects typically have detailed dpps or recipes that talk about what they want. What we're finding is that it is talking in general about what they want. Right in design, build, you look at criteria documents, progressive design. Build, you work with users. But we found out over time is the users all come from a slightly different point of view, and we learn a lot by asking them questions. We did a building recently that was specifically to draw Hispanic women and underserved students into STEM and sciences. And so we started asking a lot of questions about how they picked their college and what was the process they went through. And they were very clear that it's a family affair. And when they were visiting colleges, they were visiting with aunties and grandmas, and the extended family was supporting maybe that first gen college student. And so we pivoted a little bit, and we made outdoor spaces outside the lobby and in shady areas where family members could wait. We even have, like a self guided tour through the building that you can just hold up your iPhone to because it wants to speak to people in more general about the sciences going on. So it's easy to solicit input from a broader range of building inhabitants, sometimes because the design build team is already questioning and thinking and ideating together.

Deb Sheehan  07:59

And I've got a belief, Susan, that probably just the diversity of what a design build team pulls together early on in that engagement process brings so many varied perspectives of how people are actually hearing what they're receiving from the user feedback, right? And our experience in healthcare, it's a little bit of a danger zone for us when we go too deep in mining into user experience, simply because you have to have a perspective again of not just dealing with healthcare today. I think we've all seen a radical shift in healthcare, even over the last five years. So for me, it's you have to keep one eye on the horizon, and you have to listen, maybe with a different intent. And that's getting exactly to what you're highlighting is what was the root motive, getting past some of the surface response, but really actively listening to say, what were some of the value sets that were being expressed to you? Right? And then taking a team from design build that can help distill that because of the complexity of the interaction of the systems that have to go into play here it is often a equal parts human quotient, technology quotient, build, science. And so how do we merge all of that? I think design build is really well suited to do.

Susan O'Connell  09:09

So yeah, and you can imagine a hospital building is going to do all kinds of technical things that maybe a classroom building or a student lounge or a mentoring center isn't doing. And so what we're trying to do is make those spaces flexible enough with furniture and layout, so that they will grow over time as the student population grows and changes, we always want to leave some space for customization in the future. And that

Erin Looney  09:38

prompts a bonus question, Deb, for you to compare to the higher ed examples we just talked about. What does the flexibility and the customization? Just give me one example of what that looks like in a healthcare setting.

Deb Sheehan  09:50

Yeah, I think we've thrown by the wayside the design of Swiss watches. So we used to get very precise and dial into the exact need or a procedural expectation. And the technology that would support it. I think what we found now is technology is eclipsing almost every six months. So when we start to see, yes, there's miniaturization going on with robotics in, for example, an or but at the same time, we had some caregivers that came to us and said, well, I need more space. But it was great when we did a mock up one time on a trauma room where they were actually running a simulated resuscitation, and what they learned was more space was actually the liability. What they wanted was to be tendent at the bedside with the patient and within an arm's reach of what they needed on demand. What we found is the bigger those rooms got, the more heroic It was to be able to get to the kind of equipment that they needed for running the resuscitation. So it was kind of a great epiphany, I think, for users that came in with a bias, I'll be honest, they came in with a bias that more is better. But I think in this instance, when they actually ran the simulation in the prototype and saw the mock up demonstrate to them what the situational awareness was, not only with each other in that space in a trauma room, but also with the critical equipment and life saving needs that they had that were sometimes tethered. You know, at the perimeter, they really wanted to collapse that space pretty dramatically. So for us, it's starting to look at those kind of testing grounds, but it's also knowing that what we plan for today is not going to be the same equipment, and probably not even the same complexity of case, or even, I hate to say it, but even the same populations. So we want to make certain that what we're doing is to Susan's point, giving as universal of a platform as we can that can be radically adaptable, so that these buildings do have an enduring life cycle that is useful over 1015, 2025, years. And it's hard, because I think sometimes they start to feel a little too agnostic to the customization that the users are seeking. But that's where the prototype really starts to come to bear, because you can start showing them what's on the horizon, what they should be anticipating, as far as next generation delivery

Erin Looney  12:10

and staying on the topic of the people impacted by the spaces. But let's expand it to the industry. How are stakeholders, like firms, owners, contractors, even full market sectors. How are they shaping or articulating human centered design in practice,

Susan O'Connell  12:26

when we take that human centered design and we push it a bit to inclusive design kind of very universal, it's about equity, belonging, student success. It can be about faculty success in research and teaching, also that inclusive design is historically, trying to serve students that haven't been served in the past. And I think that the way we're serving those students is, let's say we're making a big kind of study hall student lounge, right? The study hall is not what it used to be. Now. It's a place where you can sit by yourself on the edge and do your homework and just be part of a greater whole. You can work with one person, small tables for three and kind of almost like a big group, like in a coffee shop picnic table, where you can get together with a big group. So the idea is you're still serving the average students, or whoever that is, but you're really making different places where those students feel safe and secure, whether it's in their student housing, a classroom building or a teaching lab. I think in the government and civic realm that we do a lot of work in design justice, in working with users and groups, it feels like making sure that everyone feels comfortable enough to participate in government and participate in public things, and that no building is so intimidating that you don't want to go in. Right? For so long, our government buildings have been intimidating. Think about it. I mean, those buildings have been intimidating from the Dark Ages, starting with cathedrals, right, to tell everyone who was boss.

14:04

So by design, right? Absolutely,

Susan O'Connell  14:07

that's changed wildly. Now our latest big State Office Building has a childcare center and food service and a gallery and a public auditorium and a public plaza. It's very different world now, but again, that's just pulling everyone into the architecture to kind of take the greatest advantage of their opportunities.

Erin Looney  14:28

Being across from the FBI building, which is where the DBIA headquarters is located, downtown DC, and being in DC, I see what you're talking about every day, but I can see how people might not want to go on in there, the design build delivers podcast is brought to you by Archons, your technology optimization partner, helping design build teams streamline workflows with Autodesk solutions, expert support and real world training ready to work smarter and faster, get tools insights and schedule. Initial your AI readiness check at our cons.us/dbia.

Erin Looney  15:08

Now it's time to move to the DBIA sales pitch. Part of this DBIA is design, build done right, the universal best practices, which listeners, you can download for free@store.dbia.org I assume you both have your own copy, so I'm not going to push it on you, but we talk about cost, schedule and performance, but also, of course, collaboration and whole team success. Talk about how this plays out in real life, when you're also trying to balance and keep the human centered priorities in this mix.

Deb Sheehan  15:38

It's always a balance. You've got to go in intentionally to try to define, truly define what value is for the stakeholder and user. And as you might imagine, the chief operating officer or chief financial officer in the executive suite probably has a different value set than the mother of two that has a pediatric patient that's going through oncology treatment than the physician that perhaps is feeling burnout because of some of the shortages in the workforce. So when we bring those groups together, it's important to actively listen, but you also have to try to reconcile. And when I say reconcile, I think all of us have experienced too often going on in starting a project, and you get this lovely statement of goals or a vision statement. It's motherhood and apple pie. It's what's not to like. You know, it's very inspiring, but it's probably not terribly directional. And so with human centered design, we have to kind of distill those value sets into supportive measures of success that can be evidence to truly guide a team through decision making process. So I always call it our true north exercises, because it's hard. It's not easy when all of a sudden you make a statement and you're trying to reconcile it with a diverse group of stakeholders, set a hierarchy to the value statements that are being shared, and then truly trying to draw what is the metric by which I know I'm getting closer or farther away to that value statement? How will it be evidenced or exemplified in the project solution? So that's the first step for us. That's always the challenge, and it does make people uncomfortable a bit because there is a little bit of thumping and bumping that happens because of the diversity of stakeholders that are being solicited. So you have to find a way to neutralize kind of the leadership, governance piece of it, to be able to elevate, maybe, what are some of the less dominant voices in the room. So that's the first piece. What I've experienced, though, is when done right, I really believe that design build coupled with human centered design, excels from first concept all the way through first patient, because that stewardship of stakeholder needs is not just a shopping list of wants and wishes. It truly is getting at essential requirements, and then those essential requirements are not just grounded in today's challenges, but they're looking at a future state that we know is going to have different workflows, different workforce patterns, different disease management that we're going to have to face. So it's proven to be a very good method to have stewardship of those capital dollars while allowing care models to evolve over time. And so that's really the balance that we always have to play, is, how much do you invest today? How much do you anticipate for tomorrow? And so a lot of times we're having discussions about what I call contingency mode analysis, kind of that next what if? What if this happens? What if we don't see this come to fruition, as far as the technology being reduced in size, if we don't see this workflow, if we don't see this patient population, really start to materialize in the market. So to me, it's trying desperately to kind of harness how do we improve workflows within the spaces? Because it's ultimately about how it performs. Yes, it has to be welcoming and it has to be maintainable, but I think it also has to anticipate emerging technologies. It's got to satisfy workforce. Many industries are touched very dramatically right now by this war on talent, and so everybody's using kind of the new shiny object of facilities to attract and retain so making those improvements and shepherding those capital expense investments so that they are not only addressing workforce challenges and recruiting and retention, but also obviously looking at the wide array of patient needs and healthcare. And you know, we've got six generations in patients now, guys, so we've got everything from the infant to the what I call our octogenarians, and we're on the cusp of what I also lovingly refer to as our silver tsunami, which we're going to have for the first time ever in the United States. We're going to have more people in the 65 year age cohort, plus than we will in zero to 17 years of age. It's kind of shocking when you start to tune. What do those facilities need to look like? Then, as far as meeting the customers that are going to demand the services out of those facilities, because you start to think of how an 82 year old navigates through space versus how a 30 year old navigates through space, I do think that it's it's a huge agent, but I you have to get to the root of what is the value definition and what are those performance metrics, and really take the time everybody wants to just start drawing and building right away. And you have to take the time to set that foundational work so that the team understands what a shared value set looks like and what is truly the measure of success that's going to be equivalent to that achieving those values.

Susan O'Connell  20:46

So Aaron, the question about unique challenges in budget, schedule and performance as design, build has just absolutely taken over the West. One thing that all of our owners have heard is efficient processes and faster schedules. So the schedules that we're seeing at all these public buildings, whether it is educational, civic and government, they're really aggressive. It's hard to get this deep analysis in user interaction in these schedules. So what we do a lot is we as soon as we win the draw, like as soon as it's ours, we have that conversation with the client about opening it up and looking to bring more voices to the table. And it's sometimes people who are heading up facilities groups, they are a little wary of inviting too many voices to the table because they think it will increase the cost of the building, they think it will elongate the schedule. And both of those things can happen, and we've all seen it, but we kind of do like more of a SWAT attack, you know, in the first 45 days, and try and get a lot of meetings in. And there was a project we did recently, that was for an HSI Hispanic serving university where, you know, 67% of their population was Hispanic, and probably most of those were first generation, and we were doing this building to draw them into stem and the sciences. And so we said, we looked around their website, there was a couple of really great Hispanic faculty coalitions that met together that were just all about how their pedagogy was changing and how the student population was changing. I'm like, can we talk to them? And the campus said, No, you know, we're setting you up with all the right conversations you have to have. Sure enough, a couple weeks later, suddenly we were meeting with them, and they called us on it. They said, it sounds like you've been meeting with people for months and you're just checking the box with us. So it disrupted the whole process in a good way, in a very good way, the Provost and the president of the campus were very busy for four or five days calming everyone down, but once they knew they were in the fold with us, they gave us absolutely amazing information. A lot of them were doing research on how first gen students learn, versus families who have sent people to college year after year. It's easy to be afraid of having too many voices, but as architects, that's what we do. We organize the town halls and the user meetings. We're good at it, right? We're good at collecting information, and better to collect it up front than to wait so long and be called out later, is what my advice is. And lot of people do programming or feasibility studies, make sure when you're doing that pre work for your project, that you get those voices to the table, you understand which are the strongest voices with the best ideas, and you can invite some of them to kind of stay in touch as the design team is developing it.

Erin Looney  23:55

I'm sure understanding why you would do it that way could be a game changer for people who might be a little bit hesitant. Let's talk about our project team awards, specifically our merit awards for 2025 there were several projects that placed Human Centered Design front and center, which you'll be able to see them celebrated at the award ceremony in Las Vegas, November 6, as part of the Design Build Conference and Expo, which is November 5, sixth and seventh. So while awards are top of mind, how do you see something like that, like the DBIA project team awards shaping this conversation around human centered design, and how would recognition potentially influence the way owners and teams prioritize human centered design and design justice elements on future projects.

Susan O'Connell  24:46

Well, I think it's really important to recognize them. I think it's really important for us to ask teams, when they're turning in the story, to elaborate on these kinds of issues. And I think. As we start to give those projects public recognition and awards, everyone's paying attention to that. Universities are interesting. They are a collaborative bunch, like all the campus architects meet every quarter to, like, just exchange ideas about how they're delivering projects. And you can bet design, build, human centered design, inclusive design, it's all being talked about, but they're also very competitive. They're competing for students, right, almost like customers. So they watch what's going on, and I think what's going to come out of this is that this kind of design, hearing all these voices, doing this deep analysis, really understanding what works now and creating a building that is flexible to change with pedagogy or medical science is going to be the norm in the same way that I don't know. Was it like 1520, years ago LEED came out, we all started doing sustainable and resilient design, and at first it was kind of an extra service on the side, and you had a very specific consultant to help you do it. Now, sustainability is built into everything that architects and engineers do. We're thinking about the resiliency of the building systems and the sustainability of the building in programming before we've even started to draw a line on a piece of paper, and now that's just part of what we do. So the more buildings that are recognized for what value this brings to the building and why the building was better because of those voices, it's a differentiator now, and we write about it in proposals, but maybe in five years. Deb, I don't know what you think, it might not be the same differentiator, depending on how, how good people get at doing it. I think it's what architects, designers and engineers, it's what we need to do and builders.

Deb Sheehan  26:53

I think it will eventually become table stakes. I think right now, it still is a differentiator. But anytime you feature a project with recognition like an award. I love the way DBIA does the profiles, because I think that's where the act of learning and the discourse happens is really understanding the depth and breadth of a project, taking techniques from that project, perhaps engaging with the team members that delivered that project. It's all that peer to peer, as Susan said, learning from each other. And while they are all competitive, perhaps if they're saturated in the same market, I think the breadth and depth of the work is coast to coast. So I often find that somebody will call up and be very fascinated from Stanford as to what Yale was doing. It's that kind of sharing. I think that they are a group that really has a an appetite to want to learn that and so elevating the conversation through an awards recognition program. The human centered design really takes it to a level that it isn't just an esthetic beauty contest. It is about true building performance. It is, how are you meeting the stakeholders needs? How have you anticipated those in the building, and how can it be really enduring? So I think those are the nuggets that people will take, and the profiles that we do with featuring award projects really give people a great reading literature and the touch points that they're looking for as far as continuing their own journey of continuous improvement, we'll

Susan O'Connell  28:25

do kind of live benchmarking, where we will take the user group leaders to look at other buildings like that. And we purposely are a bit quiet on those tours right, and we are letting the people who are running that building, a research lab, a student housing project, dining, classroom building. Talk about how the building is performing for them, and they don't talk about the surfaces or the finish or the way the lobbies two stories or anything like that. They talk about how many faculty members love teaching in this active learning classroom, and that it's booked 10 hours a day, Monday through Saturday. So they are really making the case for us about design and about making the buildings work for doctors and nurses or students and faculty, and it allows them to see it with their own eyes, instead of us describing it to them in plan and elevation and stuff. So many people cannot read drawings, but you can feel when a building is lively and loved and used. You get a feeling when you walk in

Erin Looney  29:33

that reminds me of how many times I've rented an apartment over the years, and I've gotten much better at it. And you talk to somebody else, and they're in their first rental, and they end up renting a polished turd because it's nice and shiny when they go in, but there are no outlets, or it's a tiny closet. Nothing fits, nothing works. That's fun. So let's talk now about people who are thinking about doing this, people who are thinking about bringing in human centered design principles. So if an owner said to you, this all sounds great, I really think it would be ideal for our next design build project to incorporate human centered design as a major piece of the project. What is the one piece of advice you'd give them? And to add to that, are there any DBIA resources you'd direct them to?

Susan O'Connell  30:18

My piece of advice comes from a lot of experience in the last 10 years doing this really early engagement open up the doors wide at the very beginning of the process, when people can have an effect on the program and the plan for the building, and you hear all those voices, and you can zero in on the very articulate voices who understands what the building or the project is doing, and you can pare it down over time, but if you kind of do detailed criteria and, God forbid, bridging documents, it's very hard to infuse new ideas after someone has started To design. So get that in your upfront programming and brainstorming, and it can start really big in town halls with people having 60 seconds to speak. If you give someone 60 seconds to speak, they're going to tell you about the one thing that is most important to them. So I kind of love the town hall format at the beginning and and don't wait till you're already down the road with design to ask people how they feel about something, because they are going to feel excluded. And we have learned that lesson over and over. So start early, really early. I don't know about any DBIA products that we have for that, so I'm so sorry.

31:43

We're gonna rely on Aaron to push those.

Erin Looney  31:46

What are they? Aaron, oh, now you're gonna put me on the spot.

Susan O'Connell  31:49

Yeah, there might be like, presentations or webcasts. Okay, I got you.

Erin Looney  31:53

Yeah, perfect. There's also potentially starting points for people. Would you think looking at the best practices or looking at the Design Excellence statement, just to kind of go big, big, big picture, and then start thinking about your individual

Susan O'Connell  32:05

projects. Absolutely, the Design Excellence statement, if I recall when we were writing, it has a whole thing about universal access and inclusivity. So it really does.

Erin Looney  32:15

Yep. I am very proud of myself right now. Bravo.

Deb Sheehan  32:20

Bravo. Well done. While Susan highlighted already the early engagement, I would say, be very intentional in applying the process of human centered design, because I think that's where I see people try to take shortcuts. So you know, the stage gates, that first one is really important, which is the clarification and really trying to understand and using all the arsenal of tools that we've talked about to gather the research and assess your stakeholder needs. And that means throwing away, or maybe removing yourself from some bias that you might come to the project with. Sometimes it might be, as Susan highlighted in her example, coaching an owner through bias that they might have, and really taking the time to not shortcut that. Don't just race to go ahead and start designing and building. I think it's really important that you clarify that and then allow for that iteration to ideate. Prototyping is a wonderful, wonderful tool, because it allows you to fail fast and fail forward, right? I'm a big fan of that. It's like, let's just throw some things out there. See what's sticking, see what's not sticking. But I'd much rather do that when it's just something that can fall on the studio floor, as opposed to when it's a building that now you're living with for the next three decades. And so I think bringing and harnessing that piece together will tease out and clarify even further some of those expectations. Two things that I often remind our team about is there's two types of expressions that you'll hear in these focus groups. One is the explicit, where they'll tell you everything they don't like it's real easy. As humans, we start there, right? I can't always tell you why, but I can tell you that I don't like it and I'm reacting with a visceral response. So that's the explicit, but there's often the latent and some of the best product evolutions that have come to be really have come from diving deeper and getting into the root analysis of a need that probably couldn't even be articulated yet. And so when I think about institutional work, that's always kind of in the back of my mind. Of you have to be thinking about what the next generation looks like you have to be anticipating the next level of systems, and that's exciting, but it can also be a little paralyzing when you get into analysis paralysis, so you have to move into that ideation phase pretty quickly and start testing so that you can move through the development and the implementation phases. And the one piece that I often find that unfortunately, teams, collective, not just owners, often don't take the time to do is when we finish a project. And this maybe goes back to your question about awards, we don't always communicate the innovations that were articulated through the values. So bring it all back full circle. So it needs to have that why statement kind of as a drum beat throughout the entire project, but then coming back when you're doing your in service and onboarding of the new facility, and making sure that that why statement ties to those values again, so that people again, if they're going through change management in either workflows in the building and how it's been anticipated for next generation solutions. That's really a critical step that I find so often we don't do justice to and so it's a really important piece when we're kind of closing out a job, to make sure that that transition to operations has that full circle connectivity, back to really, that tie back to those explicit and latent needs that informed the why statement and the success metrics.

Susan O'Connell  35:46

I think that's such a great observation that we get really close with a group of users and facilities types, and we spend three years getting this building up and running. But there is no like this is why we did this, to the people who start working and inhabiting it. So many times I've gone into buildings that we've done, and someone has moved something around and tried to set something up that's a little awkward. I said here I want to show you, because we had a specific spot for that and and they're like, Oh, well, no one told me the Design Build Team is big, right? It's the three of us, the owner, the contractor and the architect. We could maybe do a better job at onboarding the people to understand the design moves and the design decisions, right? We typically keep design evolution logs, where we make big decisions about things, we can help bring people up to speed that way,

Erin Looney  36:43

for sure. Going back a little to Deb, you were talking about this with technology in 2001 there was a movie called Minority Report. Tom Cruise was in it. And if you ever saw it, you noticed their phones were teeny, tiny. I mean, they were, they were smaller than when everybody decided the Bluetooth headsets were something to do, and that's the way we were going. We were going towards smaller and smaller and smaller phones, and then 2007 kicks in, and the iPhone comes out, and now they're big again. And so it was interesting. So everything that was like, Oh, the future there was completely kaput at that moment, but it was, it's interesting to hear you talk about that with these spaces, because we can make all the plans we want. We can look ahead and think this is what it's going to look like, and maybe it's going to look like Minority Report, and then it actually doesn't. So we're going to look ahead now a little bit, thinking about everything we've talked about today. Where do you see human centered design breaking new ground? And then if we fast forward five or 10 years, what are your hopes for human centered design and inclusive design, and how it reshapes the built environment?

Susan O'Connell  37:49

I'm going to talk about the higher ed kind of point of view first. So we got very good at designing active learning classrooms, teaching labs, where students could have hands on peer to peer learning, and that was all kind of in person, and then covid slammed on all of us, and we had to relearn everything, and it took years, but we got ready at delivering really good remote education and doing it with several pedagogies, like you read something before class, you get in a discussion on Zoom, then you move out into chat rooms. You know, all our technology fed into everyone. So in higher ed, I think the next thing that we're going to try and do very, very well is to seamlessly bring the in person and the remote together, because that is another way of including everyone. Maybe someone can't make it to class, maybe they're holding down two jobs. So to me, that is kind of our next step in the next few years in higher education, and I think a market that hasn't really been tapped yet is housing. Most housing is designed around a little nuclear family of four with the dog, or kind of urban apartments or townhouses, but there's a million ways to live, and especially out here, we've got co living. We have some multi generational housing, which is really wonderful when you have three or four generations in the same space. There's a lot of specialized housing that is supportive for foster youth who are aging out of the system, retirees, those who are health challenged. And I think we're going to get way better at that. And Deb, you said something about our population aging, we better get better at all of that, right? I think that right now there's a few great models where you can go and live pretty much independently, and then have some kind of a step. I think that can be even more gradual. I think those places where you can get help all the way up to skilled nursing will start being way more embedded into our communities. And then you don't take. Someone who is at their most vulnerable in their late 70s or early 80s, and try and put them in a brand new environment. I think we can do a lot of thinking about the continuum of housing, and I think it can really benefit from inclusive and human centered design.

Deb Sheehan  40:17

I'll maybe take a pivot that isn't probably is related to bricks and mortar, but with just seeing what the demand signals out there in front of us with regard to healthcare needs and the shortage of workforce guys, I know that technology is going to take a more prominent position. It has to, otherwise we're all going to be in trouble at the same time, if we could take human centered artificial intelligence and really start to tune how those systems of integration for AI are prioritizing human values and the requirements of unique users, right? So how do I get it so that it almost takes that role of generative AI that starts to tune itself to whether my demographic is 40 or 50, or whether it's 80, I think that's what we have to bridge the gap on, and it has the opportunity to do a number of things for us, right? I mean, we've already seen AI and healthcare starting to boost some of the efficiencies with coding and support scripts that are really kind of doing clinical documentation support for caregivers. But I also think at a broader scale, it's going to start to address some of those concerns we all have, privacy, security. Am I seeing my rights respected with regard to how AI is evolving? So I think if we could start to shift with how we're looking at the adaptive development of artificial intelligence and really taking human centered and put again that user in the center of the solutioning. I think that's where there's a huge opportunity over the next two decades, and I think we're stumbling into it right now. I don't think it's very intentional at this point. It seems to be very and my team will laugh if they ever listen to this? Because they've always heard me say that I don't want you to behave like need a chicken, got a chicken. Need a chicken. Got a chicken. We have to be better than that, and so it has to be evolving to a point that I can start to get more custom scripts I can use and harness the power of what human centered influence can do, as far as the design technique, to the algorithms that have historically driven AI to really start tuning those, to really customize to an audience, and being that interloping gap fill that we are all going to be desperately seeking here in the short term. So I'm tackling it from that gap. I think Susan's tackling it from we already see a pronounced need, and we see a forecast in front of us on the housing front as well that something's got to get we have to do better than where we're at right now. That would be probably where I see it going, and my greatest hope for where it's

Susan O'Connell  42:53

going, I would say that kind of in the STEM research and collaboration. Do you remember when universities had a chemistry building, a biology building, an engineering building, those are gone, and they're not getting funded. If you are not doing research in a multi disciplinary team, you are not getting federal dollars or state dollars, right? It is all about collaboration, and the collaboration is between hard sciences and soft sciences, and they're all using AI. So I am really wondering if the next frontier is, how is all of that research about the way they make discoveries about our most complex problems in society, climate change, resiliency, or curable diseases, or diseases that aren't curable yet, but we're hoping to be and I'm wondering if that collaboration that is so opened up now and so multi disciplinary will even change the way that architects, builders and engineers do buildings together, right? Because it's a different model, and it's making tremendous breakthroughs at a breakneck feet. So maybe we'll learn a lot from that collaboration model combined with AI absolutely well.

Erin Looney  44:08

Now you know what the chickens are all about. I hope it's never as simple as need a chicken, got a chicken, but if we listen, adapt and keep people at the heart of the process, we stand a much better chance of getting it right. To go deeper into some of what we talked about in the episode, you can explore DBIA is design build done right, best practices, the Design Excellence position statement and other resources@store.dbia.org you can also check out our project and team awards and see how human centered design factored in this year@dbia.org and of course, mark your calendar for the Design Build Conference and Expo in Las Vegas in November. If you enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you did check out the earlier two part blog series with Deb Sheehan and Barbara Wagner on healthcare and design build. It's linked in the show notes, and it's a great companion to the episode. I've linked all the goodies from the episode, actually. Ly in the show notes and on the design build delivers blog. So anything we talked about, you should be able to get a hold up through there and keep an eye out for a lot more from this chat. We have a really exciting bonus episode with Deb and Susan coming soon for now that'll do it for the design build delivers podcast brought to you by art cons. Thanks again to Deb Sheehan and Susan O'Connell for sharing their perspectives on how human centered design is reshaping healthcare, higher education and civic projects and for making chickens part of the official record. I am Aaron Looney, thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time on the design build delivers podcast brought to you by our cons. Learn more at our cons.us/dbia. You you.