Host: So welcome to the podcast today. Would you please introduce yourself? 

Casey Lindberg: Yeah. My name is Casey Lindbergh. I'm a design researcher for a large architecture firm called H K s. And my background is in psychology research before getting trained in architecture. 

Host: That's a very interesting background.

So why did you choose this? 

Casey Lindberg: So I have strange background academically and meandering around to find my role in the world. But I think it usually helps to give a little bit of that background, just understand where I'm coming from. So as a. As a kid, like in high school I was a total math and science nerd.

I liked art and things too, but I was really into chemistry and physics and math. And then when I went to school for my undergraduate, I took my first psychology course and there I understood for the first time, How I could use those tools was something that was, seen as a little bit more of a softer science or a social science, but it also was a lot more tangible.

We talked about the brain or we talked about different research methodologies and we talked about things that every single person can kinda relate to cuz they're answering really difficult questions, but still able to use those sort of math and science techniques with different methodologies.

So I found that really exciting. And just carried that through straight to grad school. So after undergraduate, I went to the PhD program in psychology research. I was working in a memory and aging lab using different kinds of research methods and all sorts of stuff like that. And towards the end I had a little bit of a like an end of PhD crisis where I was thinking, this is really good work.

I think it's valuable work, valuable research in an aging world. But I don't really understand how I fit into to this. I didn't wanna do the same kind of work that my advisors were doing, which is writing a lot of grants and writing a lot of papers, and that's it. I wanted something a lot more tangible.

So I actually went back and I saw a career counselor in school and they said, what'd you wanna be when you were a kid? And I remembered when I was a little kid, I wanted to be an architect, so they encouraged me to go back to school. And I did that. So I went to a massive architecture program that had unrelated background so in school with a lot of people that have varied, very different undergraduate  backgrounds and other things.

And as soon as I got there, I of understood my place in that world and I understood that I was taking my scientific training and my scientific literacy and. Attention to how things impact human behavior for granted. I had this assumption that everybody in the world of architecture was really interested in people and how spaces impacted other people.

And of course, that's not why everyone gets into architecture. You get into architecture for all sorts of reasons. And I was also frustrated by the lack of training that was available for people in my program and later learned in basically all architecture programs that there's not a, any kind of set curriculum for understanding what I think should be the very first thing that we understand, which is how people behave and how people interacted in environments.

Cause we have such power as architects. Over, over people's lives, their health and their wellbeing. So that's how my, I found my niche. Even though people from the outside, my family or friends didn't really understand how I could take a psychology background and apply it in an architectural world The niche that I'm in now doesn't feel like a niche at all.

It seems like something that should be growing and growing because we're hopefully designing spaces at any kind of scale for people first if we, and so having an understanding and work working with people that have some sort of training in a social science is really critical to get that bigger picture.

So that's really 

Host: interesting. I think that really leads into my second question is what is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew before graduation? 

Casey Lindberg: Yeah, only one thing, huh? So there's a lot There's probably a zillion things. But one thing that I thought of was if I think about undergraduate stuff undergraduate graduation, when I was graduating psychology, I think it would've been I don't know how relatable this is to engineers, but I think for me in the, in a social science, I think it would've been really nice to know.

Social sciences, like psychology do have a place in careers like engineering and architecture. It may, the path may not be super clear always but that's changing a lot at the intersection of fields is usually where innovation happens. And I think in school, a lot of people in the social sciences don't really know what they're gonna do after  graduation.

They think it's just a path in academia or something that they don't really think is gonna be related to their degree at all, which is really unfortunate. Everything we do as a species is very closely related to our species behavior our way of thinking, our beliefs, our biases. So this requires intelligent insights from those that have some sort of related training in those fields.

Yeah again I think just understanding that those intersections exist in the world. Jobs are being created all the time that cater to those intersections, and that's really where innovation.

Host: Yeah, I think intersections of, the hard sciences and engineering and the soft sciences is a really rich area and I think there needs to be greater appreciation on both sides for what the other can contribute.

Yeah. So that's a really great insight. Can you recall a professional challenging situation and what did you learn from it? 

Casey Lindberg: Yeah, so I think the most relevant thing here, the first thing that came to mind when thinking about this question was a pattern that I've noticed more of, a pattern of  challenging situations.

And there are patterns in our own, or my own, or my team's own expectations of how perfect a deliverable needs to be. And whether that's a, a professional report that you write up that has. Research backed design decisions and shows sort of visual examples for clients, whether it's, just a very specific client deliverable where you may, maybe you've gathered new data or you've synthesized something for them with design solutions or it's even curriculum, like new curriculum development.

All those things In my career over the last like 10 or 12 years, there's been a pattern of me and those really close to me thinking that there. Some sort of perfect state that needs to hit before it's released into the world. And unfortunately that means that there's, because of that bias that I have, there's a, which I think is really common among people.

There's a diminishing returns. Happening there. So you're spending all this time with maybe a lot of different cooks in the kitchen, a lot of smart people in the room. An example would be, at my firm, we did a lot of work on the work from home findings. So early in 2020, how does our physical environment interact with things like demographics, health and wellbeing, outcomes when people were forced to work from home.

All sorts of interesting things though there. But the first report that we put together, we spent so much time. Him adjusting and tweaking forever where we really could have been spending our efforts on next iterations of that report. So we were facing these sort of diminishing returns as we went along, and I could feel that too many people, too many smart people in the room trying to make something perfect before you release it.

And in the end, of course, it didn't have to be perfect. Of course, it still wasn't perfect because we kept talking about it over and using its material and adjusting it and improving the content. . So if you have that kind of frame of mind, I think it can help a lot for you to. Which parts of that deliverable or those visuals or those key takeaways are resonating most with your intended audience.

And then you can spend the time later on to make them as reusable collateral. I don't know if this is true, but it came up [once when I was developing some curriculum that. From a European perspective that Americans have this this kind of bias and trying to make something perfect first before they release it.

I don't know if that's true at all, but it really resonated with me. And yeah, obviously there's like a place in engineering and structural architecture decision for perfection and for safety, but for big new ideas for thought leadership. Moving the needle, getting it out the door and then making changes is a lot better path, I think to success.

You'll get better at the content, your product will improve because of the feedback that you're getting. It doesn't all have to be, Hey, this is perfect. And again, the alternative is waiting forever and not getting as much exciting a content out, or not getting it out at all, which has also happened in my career.

Host: Yeah, I think that's really great advice. And one thing I've often said to my team is don't let perfection get in the way of progress. Yeah. I think getting feedback whether it's from clients or your fellow team members is really important and it can make the end product better. And you can't get that feedback if you just keep it to  yourself.

Casey Lindberg: Or keep it to your small group. 

You're not getting where you need, where you're gonna get the most bang for your buck is people outside your immediate group. Yeah. 

Host: You alluded to this in your intro. But what sort of advice would you impart to someone at the start of their career?

Casey Lindberg: So it, considering an architectural or engineering intersection audience? I think one of the biggest things that I would really like to impart on people in that field is, Think about sustainability and re redefining sustainability as something that's more that, that involves the social sciences.

So in, in other words, it involves, Humans and human behavior more. I often find when I'm talking within my architecture firm that when you say green or you say sustainability, they associate those two things as just being energy efficient just being good for the planet. But in order to have things that are good for the planet, you really need to have them be usable by human beings and have human beings have agency over the use of different products.

 Toward that end, I think what I would say as general advice would be, again, to look where your interests lie in the intersection of fields. Again that's where innovation happens. And it doesn't have to be the social sciences that intersect with what you're interested in.

It's a way to have your skillset stand out for employers and to advance your career. It's also a way to be less susceptible to things like AI being able to do what you do . We worked with that company when I was at the University of Arizona. We worked with a company called Acuma and I'm always reminded of one of their investors, ha, had this quote that was something like, if you're standing in the middle, you're just taking up space.

Which is a pretty brutal way to put it, but it definitely resonates and remember it. Reach out to those in fields that you might not even know much about but interest you and you're the perfect place to do this, right? So you have other students from with different skillset. And you're all in one place, you're in a perfect place to do that.

So finding those intersections and leaning on other people to create that sort of intersection is also a really good way to go.

Host: I think that was really great advice and thank you very much for your time 

today.

Casey Lindberg: Of course. Thanks, Matt.