BONUS EP: LIVE from the PDC Healthcare Summit 2026

22:21So for every$8 ,000 you spend, you're going to save$30 ,000. That goes up into the millions very quickly. There's a hospital in Sacramento, California that did a study on it. They showed they saved Medicaid. In the first two years, they were open$34 million by giving people better and more prompt care.

22:41Amanda Schneider:It's win, win, win-win. Yeah. So are there a lot of our listeners, you can tell by the title, Design Nerds Anonymous, are in the architecture and design industry. You've obviously worked with a lot of those folks in designing these units. What does that audience need to hear about where healthcare is today or where it's headed? In my own little niche, there's a much better way than we've done things historically. And the clients need to understand that just because they think that's the way it's done, that maybe there's a better way and they should be amenable to looking at it. And I think a lot of times the world of architecture and design, you so much want to make your client happy, it's a little difficult to kind of challenge them.

23:22But I think this is one area, especially where they need to hear there's a better way and be willing to challenge them. And then if you still have to do it their way, well, at least you gave it a shot, right? But we have plenty of peer-reviewed major journal studies that show how incredibly superior this is for all the things we describe. But also, we eliminate almost all workplace violence, all patient-to-staff assaults, all those kind of things, which are important to every C-sweeter. Because that's the biggest complaint they get is when their staff feel like they're in danger. So what do they do?

23:55They put up a sign saying, violence isn't tolerated here. Well, the person who's assaulting you may not have read the sign. Right.

24:01Amanda Schneider:Or stop to think about it. Yes. Yeah. But maybe if you change the way you do things, there won't be those risks of violence. And that's what we try to do differently. What should we be talking about at these conferences that we're not talking about enough? Acute and emergency behavioral health. People are starting to understand it's a big issue, that it's huge, that one out of every four people in the U.S. is going to experience a behavioral emergency in their lifetimes. and it's not something you can just say, sweep it under the rug, or it's their fault because they are a bad person or something like that.

24:34Amanda Schneider:Or wait till it metastasize us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because one of the things that often people think, it's just like, oh, well, they're weak or they're a bad person, so they had these psychological problems. But these are not psychological per se. These are medical problems. And when we come into the ER, you would never yell at somebody and say, like, hey, what's your problem? Stop having chest pain. Sit down and stop having chest pain. We will tell people who are having symptoms of a psychiatric emergency, sit down and shut up. What's your problem? When it's really, those are just the same symptoms for their disease that chest pain is with cardiac disease.

25:11Amanda Schneider:Right. Well, and with cardiac disease, we've learned diet, exercise, stop smoking. What is the dialogue that needs to start happening to prevent? Eliminating the stigma and making people realize that this is not a personal failing or something they did wrong or they're a bad person, but that this is an illness like any other illness. There's nothing embarrassing about seeking help. And the earlier that you do that, the better your chances are that we're going to avoid those serious psychiatric emergencies. And we can find you the help we need. And hopefully you can live a happy, healthy life just like, you know, like you found you needed to go on blood pressure med.

25:48It can be just as simple as that.

25:53Kelly Miller. I am an architect and I work for RWJ Barnabas Health. We're an academic health system in north and central New Jersey. We have 14 acute care facilities and hundreds of outpatient and ambulatory facilities. It's, I believe, the largest employer in the state of New Jersey at 45 ,000 people. So it's a machine, and they're trying to do the best they can to serve the communities in North and Central New Jersey. For them, they're Assistant Vice President of Planning and Design. So I work in our Planning, Design, and Construction department through Facilities Management. So I'm a corporate employee serving all of the campuses.

26:37Amanda Schneider:Small job. Small job. No big deal. Wonderful. Wonderful. If you had to give us one word that describes the biggest challenge in healthcare projects right now, what would you choose? Funding. Funding. That's come up a lot today, but tell me more. You can imagine a large health system has hundreds of projects that need to come forward at any given time, and we have to fit them into the capital plan, and they can only do so much all at one time. So it's a challenge, especially in today's economy. After 2021, the price of things just skyrocketed. The escalation is tremendous. It's a hard pill to swallow.

27:19And any delay adds escalation exponentially to the cost of projects. And And it's just really hard to explain that to the finance team, this ugly thing that's there that we can't do anything about. You can make absolutely no changes to a project, but if it sits for a few months, its cost will change dramatically. So you're having to encourage quick decision making when that's not the way they're accustomed to working. So it's a really heavy balance to have to pull off.

28:01Amanda Schneider:What's broken? Obviously, inflation, we can't fix that. But is there anything that is in our control to fix? Where do you see maybe something that we should be rethinking that would help us, obviously not lower the price, but maybe make the process smoother so that we can get to a better end result easier? Yeah. One of the things that I try to offer to our corporate team is flexibility to the fullest extent that I can. Give them options for different ways to implement a project. Make recommendations for things that they could maybe defer without a major penalty. Or just design in extra flexibility for things that they can fit out at a later time.

28:45but focusing on the main or key planning units of the project that are going to get them the best return on their investment up front, just to steer them to think about it strategically and for the lifespan of a facility or a project itself to think beyond the first cost of things and have a big-picture strategy baked into the design for how they can implement the work over time.

29:17Amanda Schneider:It's interesting because in a sector like hospitality, you know, it's easy to think about your rev par and you think about some of those terms and the direct business result of being able to attract and retain clients. But in healthcare, when we think about attracting and retaining clients, like it's quite different, right? But you are talking to those finance folks. As you think about justifying the investment in physical space, What changes have you seen in your career? And where are we today? How are we looking at the justification of physical space? Is it just a must-have? Has that changed?

29:51Amanda Schneider:What does that look like today? The big shift came when the design guidelines required private rooms for patients. And patients are savvy now. They shop around for where they want to go, have their health care provided. and so they know the difference between what a private room is and what a semi-private room is and that's subpar now. So now it's a code requirement so we don't have a choice when we're designing new that has to comply with the new code requirement. That's a lot more space which adds up to a lot more dollars for getting something in half the size with the same return rate, right?

30:36So that compliance demand now isn't a choice, but what we put into those spaces now becomes the differentiator. What are the other amenities that go into all of those programs that separates us from the competition? And that's that market share piece. How do you attract the people to your facility versus your competitors? Yeah.

31:01Amanda Schneider:So if you had to think about those changes and you had to fill in this sentence. 10 years ago, or maybe we should say 20 years ago, healthcare spaces were blank. And 20 years from now, they will be blank. How would you finish that? I think that 20 years ago, they were ready for a revolutionary change, ready for the next thing to be thought of in a different way, really focused on the patient experience. I think we're there now. So I think in the future, they're going to be even more high tech than we can imagine. This advent of AI is probably going to have an epic impact on medicine and how care is delivered.

31:44And we don't know what that looks like yet. But you know that you're going to have to bake in some basic technology infrastructure into key components so that it can accept whatever may come in the future. So I think technology is going to just grow tremendously in the future.

32:04Amanda Schneider:And that's come up a lot. Like if you had to try to, I know you're no fortune teller here, we're not asking you to be, but as you hear conversations around this community, right, the AEC industry and what people are talking about when it comes to AI, what things can we imagine today? There's so many we can't imagine yet, but what conversations like how are those changes going to affect physical space? I think just the organization of things that are in spaces. There's going to be a demand or an expectation by any kind of end user that any room or space they use is going to have all of these components in it.

32:41Not so much the size of the room itself, but the things that are in it, you know, TVs that automatically connect and they can have a conference call and all of the things work. The microphones are there, cameras are there. We're nowhere near that right now. It's a whole rigmarole to get all of the AV components in, but that's going to be an expectation that it's at the ready, just like, you know, your smart devices are that are in your pocket. They're going to expect the spaces to have all of those components in it as well, even in the patient room, to be able to announce who the provider is as they're walking into the room and translate into other languages as required, have the patient be able to reach out to their family via the camera that's in the room.

33:29I think all of those things are going to be required and expected in the design.

33:36Amanda Schneider:So maybe even some of these technologies we're using in the office to have these global meetings are going to come into healthcare services. Yeah, I think so. So I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about PDC, why you come, what you are looking for this year. I think it's my favorite conference. I probably shouldn't say that, but I get the most out of this conference, I think because it's well-rounded. Most of the presentations involve folks from several different industries who have collaborated together over some design challenge, project challenge of some sort, and they're sharing that experience with the audience.

34:13And you realize that we're all in this together. We're all experiencing the same things across the country. We have the same challenges, and I get an overwhelming sense of validation. The struggles that we have are not unique, but also that the way that we've executed them in my health system is on par with how others are executing them across the country. So it's sort of like a benchmarking experience for me and a little safety net validation that we're doing the right things and we can survive all of these challenges that come our way every day in healthcare is a challenge. There's always something new that happens that you think, I can't believe that just happened.

35:06But just seeing other groups together is reassuring. The industry is very focused on the work and people are just so invested in good outcomes that ultimately makes for a better patient experience. And I just love that everybody is contributing together. And I think that makes it special.

35:31Amanda Schneider:What are we not talking about here that you wish people would talk more about? Or maybe some of the hallway conversations that are happening that you're like, this needs more time and attention. I work in plant operations, which is awesome for me because I get real-time feedback on what works and doesn't work from those folks who are holding the facility together with tape and glue and pulling off miracles every day. And their projects take on a whole other life that they just can't fathom. It's every day, 24-7, 365. Things break. Things don't work properly. There needs to be quick availability to turn something around, to restore it back to.

36:12It was intended purpose. and just the way people really use space is not something you can really learn until you immerse yourself in it and actually watch the everyday goings-on. And I think that can inform the design of products, the design and layout of a project more than anything else. So if more people would have that opportunity before they start any work, it would benefit the industry as a whole.

36:44Amanda Schneider:I love that you said that. And I think we need more of that. I think we need more of the real talk, lessons learned, what worked. But like, if I had to ask you the average time from, hey, we're going to do this project until that facilities guy takes over, what would you say that average length of time is? For a midsize project is probably like two years or more. There's the whole design piece, which you want to take your time and do properly. And then it goes in for regulatory reviews, which becomes a whole other animal, and you're at the mercy of code agencies looking at your project and focused on trying to expedite that review.

37:24Some of them can take six months or more, depending on how it goes and what it's for. I would say at least two, maybe three years for the average project.

37:35Amanda Schneider:So two to three years, and the average tenure for a Gen Zer is two years, three months. So as we look at trying to collect this. That's a scary statistic. Isn't that scary? Isn't that scary? Maybe different for the healthcare sector. I'm not sure. We haven't measured to that level. But, you know, if you think about getting those learnings and making sure those are passed down and that we're, you know, not only learning from the design, but learning from those facility guys and making those connections, I think that's a real call to action for our whole industry is if the world is moving this fast, how do we go slow to go fast to make sure that we're learning from these lessons learned and distilling those lessons that we are learning.

38:12Yeah. I don't know how to capture the attention span of the new generation. We're all trying to figure that out. You know, I mean, that's a challenge. And what's even more scary is that those that have the institutional knowledge are aging out, they're retiring, and not necessarily transferring that knowledge down the line. And that's really critical to sustaining longevity because there's a lot of parts and pieces in a health care facility. I think it well, I'm personally passionate about encouraging those in the AEC industry to cross over like I did. And I think you can have a big impact and help health care facilities and institutions to really understand what the parts of a project mean and how to help them make good decisions about their dollar and how to spend it best to get to the goals that they're trying to achieve.

39:16And it might be a completely different way than what they're used to thinking. You know, everything is not HGTV. It doesn't happen like that. That's not real, you know. But that's what they know and see. And they don't understand why does it take so long? Why is it so expensive? And they just can't. Maybe they don't want to hear the real truth, you know. They don't want it to be that expensive or to take that long. But the AEC industry folks have that knowledge and expertise. and they can be so impactful to help health systems understand that better and give them some options for how they could pull off new things that they're trying to do.

39:58Wonderful. Sometimes the best way to learn is to just jump in and try. Yeah.

40:07You blew me away this morning. When you're talking about the Wake Forest study, you raise your hands if you let your kids weigh in on vacation choices. and I realized that I'm enabling some of the actions at work by younger generations that I don't really love. Just an interesting wake-up moment for me. Ed Cheshire from Columbus, Ohio. I'm an architect by background and a manager of design and construction at Nationwide Children's Hospital. I am currently designing a$1.3 billion inpatient expansion project, so I'm leading a team for the hospital that's going to implement that tower by 2028. I'm a member of the PIN group.

40:51So the Center of Health Design has a pediatric environmental network group. So very proud of my engagement with that group and getting to sit at the table with a lot of leading children's hospitals, people that are doing facilities, project planning work. And we're basically sitting there talking about what we're doing well, what we could do better, and encouraging each other through very frequent communications about what issues and problems we're facing.

41:17Amanda Schneider:And if you had to give me one word that describes the biggest challenge in healthcare projects right now, what word would you use? There's a great fear of the unknown right now, and we're right at that precipice where there's going to be huge shifts in technology, and not quite sure what that looks like from a facility perspective, what it looks like from a nursing perspective, but there's a lot of intentionality on building adaptable spaces so that we're future-proofing as much as we can. In the new tower that will open in 28, I'm building a very robust technology background that can accommodate anything and everything, hopefully, but trying to delay technology decisions as long as possible.

42:00I don't want to open that building and be behind the curve.

42:04Amanda Schneider:We used to be in a high friction, slow change time. Yes. And today we're in a low friction, high change time. But what that creates, especially for some of us that grew up in this analog era, is a lot of uncertainty, unknown. I think this technological aspect that you're talking about is the number one thing I've heard throughout these podcast interviews, is really trying to build physical space, make very expensive, very long-term decisions when it feels like the pace of change is so fast. What do we need to be thinking about as we reconcile this fast pace of change with investment decisions in physical space?

42:42At Nationwide Children's, we want to be cutting edge. We don't want to be bleeding edge. And I think we're scared to adopt too fast. So we're looking for others to go before us. Ideally, I would have three hospitals that implemented some new technology. I can go talk to them, find out what's worked well, what would they do different next time, then apply that to what we're doing.

43:06Amanda Schneider:As we look at people that are making the decisions to invest in physical space, what are they wrestling with today? And how could we start to tie some of the investment in physical space to business outcomes that make sense to them? I've got the fortunate benefit of through pediatric institutions. We want to help each other. We do compete for some patients here and there. But in reality, we're about how do we get the best outcomes for kids across the country. But we have to be smart because we do compete for faculty. I want the best docs. My leadership, as we talk about building through the years, you know, we've had a lot of lessons learned where we have to attract a new doctor.

43:50We may do a very custom space for that person and then they leave. So we're doing much less custom. We find that custom equals risk. So how do we think about spaces that can be universal, that can flex when somebody leaves? And you'll hear people talk about like universal patient rooms. How like everybody's working towards how can we get rooms that can flip from NICU one day to something else the next if needed. Today if you look at our nursing staff we we get a lot of new people we get people that have been there a year or two or they've got a couple years 10 years a nurse and then they're training the new new nurses.

44:33So we're thinking different about how important training and onboarding is? How can spaces be more intuitive? And just simple things like when I walk into a patient room, where do I find the glove dispenser and the hand sanitizer? Can I build a muscle memory so that in every room I'm going to the same location?

44:53Amanda Schneider:Like the light switch when you walk in in the dark. Absolutely. Absolutely. So there's little things that are becoming really meaningful. wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of standard that you're working towards you're building buildings that react to this base knowledge that they've trained with somewhere somehow and it's almost like a rental car right you know where the gas and the brake is and you know generally where the gear shift is now if they can only align the radio and the air blasting and everything else when you get into a rental car but i love that idea of how do you kind of create these standards and muscle memory.

45:26Amanda Schneider:Yes. Is this your first PDC summit? Yeah, this is actually my first PDC summit. I do conferences quite a bit, but this is my first PDC. And how is this different than other conferences that you've done? Or maybe why did you come? So I'll tell you why I came. I come for the networking. I come to see people and I always leave inspired. It's the people that you talk to at conferences that really matter. Yeah. And just walking around the share room floor, like I see suppliers that I'll see every, you know, a couple times a year maybe. But these are people that are really dedicated to getting the parts and products that the hospital needs out to market.

46:08And it's just, it's so fun to go shake a guy's hand and say, hey, I'm looking for something that does this. I come back two years later and they've got what I was looking for. And every once in a while you say, hey, remember you gave me that comment and check this out. We've accommodated it. That is a really fun part of my job. Really rewarding.

46:28Amanda Schneider:Yeah. What's something that we're not talking about that we should be? I loved your generational talk today. And I think that what worries me as somebody that's growing in their career, I'm not ready to retire yet. But the next 10 years for me needs to be about how am I coaching people around me and broader than success planning. But my community, the community of construction workers, the community of clinicians that want to know more about how we make space planning decisions, the designers and the architects. And there is like a knowledge gap out there with young architects, young designers.

47:13and like since the presentation this morning, I've been thinking about it. Like I want to go, I want to go back to Columbus and I want to start getting some of those guys together and let's go have lunch and we're going to go out and see how a stud wall is put together and then let's sketch it and talk about like why you would do this or why you, why the contractors did that. There's so much out there that I think us as the older generation can help coach on. And I think about when I was in architecture school way back, there was an old guy that trained on the GI Bill, went to Harvard, you know, after the war.

47:51And he taught me to draw. He sat there and as he was drawing lines on the paper, it was like really magical to watch. And he's like, OK, so I'm drawing this line. I'm thinking about how is that line meeting the base foundation? How is this line meeting the roof? how am I preventing water infiltration? How am I preventing air infiltration? So the act of him drawing was him working through a series of problems. I lost that when I started working in AutoCAD and then I feel like a lot of that is totally gone now in the Revit 3D environment. And I would love to get back to how do we encourage architects to think about being a master builder?

48:35So if I came in and I said, hey, I've got some advice on how to do your podcast. I've never done one before, but let me give you some advice. We've kind of put architects in that same position. They've never built a building, and they're out there trying to coach the contractors how to do something that they've never done. And I think we've got things a little bit backwards now.

48:56Amanda Schneider:You know, one of the things I think that is a really big part of learning is being open to those mistakes. Do you have a project that you could talk about that maybe something didn't go well? Because I think we need to be more open to sharing these. Yes, I would love to. So I had the opportunity to build a psych unit, a pediatric psychiatric unit that opened in 2015. So we built a 16-bed unit. And at that time, the focus was totally on patient safety. And we built a really safe unit. And unfortunately, it was almost prison-like. We did some pretty colors, we did some nice art on the wall, but it felt punitive.

49:36And it sent a message to the kids in that unit and the parents that, boy, something's wrong, I'm being punished for being in this environment. Fortunately, though, because behavioral health, the service line grew so fast after we built our first beds, I had the opportunity to redo and rethink how we do behavioral health at the hospital. So we actually did some mock-up rooms. We did some focus groups. And we brought parents into the hospital to talk to us about what's it like to have a child in a behavioral health unit. And we actually had brought some families in that had lost children to suicide.

50:16And they talked about the day that you hear your child's try to hurt themselves, that's the worst day of your life. and we realized that we had built a unit for those kids rather than building them for our kids and we started to change our focus at the hospital to think about if my child's got to be in a psychiatric hospital what do I want that experience to be like and we actually because of that we're able to build a beautiful building where we started to address stigma we started to tie in and comfort features so that the kids have choices. We started to build environments that are warm and welcoming so that when you come into the unit, maybe you can engage a little bit faster instead of feeling like you're being punished.

51:02What if you can engage faster with the staff and I could get you out of that unit? So we actually saw the average length of stay drop in the new unit because kids were getting out faster, which is just amazing. What you want, especially in a mental health unit. Absolutely. That's amazing. Anything you can do to encourage behavioral health research is important. And it's going to make a difference. We're going to get there. Wonderful. So come to Columbus and see our behavioral health pavilion. It's amazing what we're doing in Columbus. Love it.

51:31Amanda Schneider:Love it. Anything else you want to say to our listeners? Any advice for them? You guys do really important work. Design is very important. So stick with it. Hang in there. And nothing beats good design. focus on good design even when clients are asking for less. Space and budgets are important, but you can always find a place to work in good design and architecture.

51:59So I'm Lynn Aguilera. I'm the executive director for strategic space planning and transition strategy at Stanford Medicine Children's Health. As a consultant, I started in 2013. What I oversee is construction projects, really any projects, no matter how big or small. One of the things I'm passionate about is the clinical voice when you're renovating in an existing facility with patients. And with my background being nursing, it's so important to just keep the patients and the families and the staff just feeling comfortable in their space the entire time.

52:32Amanda Schneider:What is one, maybe one word that describes the biggest challenge in healthcare projects right now? So I was thinking about this after I read the question, and the first word that came to my mind several times is money. There's so many issues about reimbursements, about how you get anything funded. And unfortunately, it's really sad. I've been a nurse for 30-plus years, and I've worked in county hospitals, I've worked in community hospitals, and now I'm at an academic medical center. And it's just so different being at the federally funded hospitals versus the privately funded hospitals. and we're a nonprofit.

53:08Amanda Schneider:Where are hospitals struggling? Like how do we make the connection between physical space and money? Because for corporations, it's easy. Like we want to get people to show up. We want them to collaborate. For hospitality spaces, there is a measure of trust and return on investment because they get visitors come to their hotel. But hospitals, what is the missing element with this financial piece? Because it seems very disconnected. I think one of the things that we in healthcare need to think about is who's at the end of that dollar. who's the people that we're really taking care of. And we have, I work at a pediatric facility.

53:40My background is in pediatric nursing. I would do these like 12 hour night shifts and I would tell folks that when they get like the patients or the parents would get a little like testy or I'm like, you know what? They don't get to go home. We get to go home after 12 hours. So when you're really trying to invest in something, like think about the person at the end of that. And that includes staff nowadays. All of the, finally, I feel like finally, they're talking about workplace violence. Like I have been hit. I have been hair pulled. I've just all these. And again, I worked at Pete's. It's not like, you know, adults are doing this.

54:13It's everyone. And before we just, and we get leered at or these awful things and you just took it. And we're no longer doing that anymore. And I'm loving that security is now taking a forefront. So I think the other part of that, like, you know, how do we look at what we're funding? It's really got to be about the people who are going to be in that space working and the people who we're taking care of.

54:35Amanda Schneider:So you made the decision to come to this conference. You do other conferences because we've seen you elsewhere. Yes. What specifically appeals to you about the PDC conference? What did you come here looking for and did you find it? Yes, I did. So I came here to present. One of my passions is bringing the clinical voice into construction and design and all of that process. And when I come to PDC, and I think my first conference was maybe three years ago, and it was really, because it's very heavy facilities focused. There's no, I don't see tons of clinicians. I belong to the Nursing Institute for Healthcare Design, NHD, and we're one of the supporting organizations for PDC, and we come here as a group to have that clinical voice heard, and I did, one was the clinical voice in construction projects, and then the one, the presentation I'm doing today is about simulations and having the clinicians do mock-ups and simulations to understand design ideas.

55:34So why I like PDC is these are not my people. The audience looks very different than a lot of the conference that I've been to. So I'm hoping to pull one, two, three people into thinking like, oh, maybe we should have the clinicians at the design. I'm here with the facilities person, and he said, oh my gosh, bring the clinicians into the design because when you just stick them into the design that you've designed without their input, it's awful because you just spend all this time trying to fix it. Instead, bring them to the forefront of it. Let them help with the design and then they'll be happy to be in that spot.

56:10Amanda Schneider:And what is one key takeaway from your presentation, either of them, that you think that our listeners need to hear? I think everyone needs to have a clinician in their project, starting at visioning, design through construction. One of the things that I'm super passionate about also is the logistics that go within, like, when you build in a live hospital, you have to think about noise. You have to think about turning off plumbing, connecting electrical. You turn off your electrical systems for the entire hospital. Like, that's scary. You need somebody who understands what it's like to be at the bedside, telling that family, telling that patient, like, okay, we're just going to, the lights will be off for a half hour.

56:52and they'll come back on. You really need somebody who knows what it's like to be in that situation. So my passion is getting that clinician into those construction projects. So if any, the key takeaway for me is involve us. We want to be there. And we might not know what we're doing, but then you become friends with the facilities guy. Right. And they can explain to you. So it's really interesting. We translate to each other all the time. Yeah. And I've been in this business for, got since 2009. And I still don't know. That's not my expertise. My expertise is clinician. So I think just really involving listening, right?

57:33Listening and involving that clinician at the point of care.

57:36Amanda Schneider:Yeah. Absolutely. And aside from your presentations, what is one connection you've made, one presentation you've attended, something that you've learned here that is different from other conferences? I went to a panel discussion where they had the pediatric environment network. And I think it was just the different, there was an architect, a VP over operations, and then I think a designer. But it was all just the different perspectives. And they had the same questions, but it was all the different perspectives. And I don't think when you go to different, again, like maybe nursing folks, you don't get that.

58:16So I think that the key takeaway is listen to everything. Like maybe I think my voice is important, but so is theirs. So as much as I say, listen, I need to hear.

58:24Amanda Schneider:Yeah. I think we use the elephant example at the hackathon. Everyone's seeing it from a different point of view. The elephant example for our listeners is one's describing the trunk, one's describing the tail, one's describing the leg. And they're all right, but they're seeing it from different angles. Yes. I love the hackathon. I didn't know what to expect. Yeah. And then I invited a couple of other people. I'm like, just go with me. You know, I don't know what to expect. And we still talk about it. I love it. It was just one of the, it was so rejuvenating. Yeah. You had to speak to other people in similar roles about why they should attend our hackathon at HCD this fall.

58:56Amanda Schneider:What would you say? Oh, I definitely would say perspective. You know, you are so focused in what you want people to see, but listen to other folks. And I think I was at a table with a lot of architects. Yeah. And I don't think like an architect at all. So as we dive into our 2026 research that will be our coming hackathon, one of the things that we're exploring is the role of physical space in an era that keeps getting increasingly digital. Yes. If you think about healthcare, something like a hospital, you're still going to have to go to the hospital, but we can do a lot of remote care, virtual doctor visits, things like that.

59:25Amanda Schneider:So if you had to complete this sentence, in the past, the role of healthcare spaces was blank, and in the future, the role of healthcare spaces will be blank. What are the two words that you would use, or how is that changing? I have to say security. What we took as that's just what you have to live with because you're a hospital and you're taking in the sick, right? You need to care for these people. We as health care people, we would just, we take it. We would take the abuse. We would take the workplace violence. Finally, we're at a point where we're saying, no, you cannot talk to people. You cannot strike people.

1:00:04You can't do these things to any other profession. In five years from now, I think security definitely, I'm happy to see that going in the direction that it's going. But I think it's going to be technology. We're going to outgrow technology faster than we implement it. We're already doing that. But it's just so much. I mean, AI itself, right? AI is just mind blowing. And so I think we're just we're going to outpace ourselves. And how do we catch up? Yeah. How do we make hospitals not be old before they're even open?

1:00:38Amanda Schneider:We hope you've enjoyed this special episode of Design Nerds Anonymous. And we've got more live research events coming up at ThinkLab. So if this sparked your interest, let's connect. Feel free to reach out to me, Amanda Schneider, on LinkedIn, or you can always just follow this podcast so you don't miss what's next. Design Nerds Anonymous is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Special thanks to the podcast production team, Rachel Senatore and Rob Schulte. Thanks for listening.