Kay Sargent, FASID, FIIDA, CID, LEED® AP, MCR.w, WELL AP, is a Principal at HOK and the firm’s Director of Thought Leadership, Interiors. She has recently published her first book, Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces: Advancing Sensory Processing and Cognitive Well-Being in the Built Environment, based on her extensive research and firsthand experience designing interior spaces. In this episode, Kay explains how her passion for the work led to the writing of a book and how she balanced that with her role as a firm leader. She also explains the approach behind neuroinclusive design and how to begin to optimize workplace environments.
Patience Jones: Hello and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms, buildings and how both get built. I am Patience Jones, your co-host. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host.
Brian Jones: Hello.
Patience Jones: Thank you for joining us today. Our guest is Kay Sargent, Principal and Director of Thought Leadership Interiors at HOK. Kay, thank you for joining us.
Kay Sargent: Thank you for having me. Love to be here.
Brian Jones: Workplace design has been a focus of your career. How did you develop that interest and what kept you interested?
Kay Sargent: Well, I've been interested in design ever since I was probably a young kid. I think when my parents had parties I would always draw plans for their friends, even like at the age of 10. Then in high school, I was the only girl in the mechanical drafting class, which could have either dissuaded me or been, "Sure!" The jury's still out on that one, but clearly I stuck with it, so I went to school for design. I think what's kept me interested, though, is it's such a vast field. You can specialize in so many different things.
And being a practicing designer for 40 years, there were times that I focused heavily on security design. There were other ones. I did a lot of master planning in environmental design. There were times that I did a lot of ADA assessments and then workplace strategies. I think it's my curiosity and understanding that there's limitless possibilities about what we can do in this industry and how impactful we can be.
I really, truly do believe that the places we are designing have a positive impact on people. And that's not something I take lightly. I take that very seriously. We're designing spaces that are impacting millions of people and we better have a good understanding of how well we're doing that and to what extent the designs that we are creating are influencing people.
Patience Jones: Your first book, Designing Neuro Inclusive Workplaces Advancing Sensory Processing and Cognitive Well Being in the Built Environment, was recently published by Wiley. What sparked you to write a book?
Kay Sargent: Okay, so "first," Patience - I like the emphasis on that.
Patience Jones: Did you notice that?
Kay Sargent: Yeah. First of all, I thought I would go through my entire career without ever writing a book. In fact, Despina [Katsikakis, executive partner and global head of total workplace at Cushman & Wakefield in the United Kingdom] and I have joked about the fact that we're the only two people that haven't written a book. I didn't want to, I really didn't, but a year ago we were speaking at South by Southwest and someone in the audience came over and said, "You know, I've never heard anybody talk about it this way. You've got to write a book about this." And unfortunately for me, because I would have just said, "Yeah, great, thanks. Nice meeting you," my colleague was there. It was like, "Sure!" Right? Part of that curiosity is I feel like I wake up every day and I learn something new. And it's like, well, the second you put something in writing, it's kind of a timestamp. And so we didn't want this to be instantly dated, so how do we keep it fresh? We had to think of some interesting ways to do that.
Brian Jones: Why did you choose this topic?
Kay Sargent: There's so many better questions or so many better answers than the reality, but I'll be honest. I was sitting in a room about eight, nine years ago with a client, and at the end of the meeting, we were walking out of the room and he just kind of casually said, "How do you design space for someone that's neurodivergent or ADHD?" I had an okay answer to that question. I didn't have a great answer. My curiosity was like, okay, I gotta go find a better answer for him. And we started to dig into this topic and what we found was there was a drought of information that really talked about, how do we do this? And so I went to my partners within the firm and just kind of said, "Look, this is an important thing." And everybody was on board.
We're like, "Let's do it." And we did the first report after tons of research and discussions and interviews and all kinds of things, and just kind of realized we were just touching the tip of the iceberg. And so from there, we've been on a journey where I think at this point we've done six or seven research initiatives, multiple pilots, multiple workshops, I've spoken about it, tons of literature reviews, and we're still learning something new every day. It keeps evolving.
Patience Jones: Can you explain what the terms "neuroinclusive," "neurodiverse," and "neurotypical" mean?
Kay Sargent: I'm going to throw in another one that you didn't ask. "Neurodivergent." So we are all neurodiverse. We all think and process information differently. We are not all neurodivergent. That is for people that tend to think outside of what is considered the norm, even though who wants to be "normal," right? But it's people that think differently, process things differently.
It's a naturally occurring variation in our kind of DNA about just how we process things. People that are neurodivergent tend to either be hypersensitive - they tend to be sensory avoiders - or hyposensitive - they tend to be sensory seekers. People that are neurotypical kind of fall within a predictable range of how they respond. Neurodivergence tends to be on the edges. And neuroinclusive design is taking all of that into consideration, that we do not all respond to stimulation in the built environment in the same way.
We have to create spaces for that variation of how we respond and interact and think and process that assault of sensory stimulation that is coming at us. I don't know a single person on the planet that is immune to sensory stimulation, like sound, temperature, lighting. We're all impacted by that, even if you're neurotypical. But if you're neurotypical, something that might be annoying to you, it could be debilitating to someone that's neurodivergent because they're going to feel it far more obviously. They tend to be the canary in the coal mines; they're going to feel it first and they're going to feel it more intensely. So there's a whole word salad of all those terminologies, and that's one of the challenges: the terms have changed over time and they've evolved throughout the book.
Brian Jones: You reinforce the concept that designing for neuroinclusivity is designing for all people. Explain how that works in practice, because the assumption is often that neuroinclusive design means "design not for neurotypical people."
Kay Sargent: It's like the curb cut analogy. Curb cuts don't just help people in wheelchairs. They help people with a roller bag or strollers. They help people with ambulatory issues. They help people that are rollerblading or on bikes or whatever that might be. Again, I don't know anybody that is immune to being impacted by all that sensory stimulation.
And so if someone that is neurodivergent is saying, "God, that sound is really bothering me," or "those lights are really too harsh," the likelihood is that it is impacting other people that might be neurotypical, but it's just annoying to them. But that annoyance is still eating away at your productivity, at your well-being, at your ability to be mindful, at really, your ability to be engaged. It is impacting all of us. So we kind of say when you design for the extreme, you benefit the mean, or when you design for the edges, you get the middle for free.
Patience Jones: I love that in the book you wrote about what could be described as sort of "overcorrecting" for acoustic transmission. You explained that space that is completely devoid of sound would be deeply uncomfortable for most people. That was definitely an "a-ha" moment for me in thinking about acoustics and spaces. What are some of the other "a-ha" moments that clients and project partners have had after speaking with you?
Kay Sargent: I think there's a strong sense right now that offices are too loud. And I'd actually say many offices are too quiet. If you are seeking out quiet, okay, then that's fine. You've sought that out. But if you're in a space that isn't naturally supposed to be quiet, it's actually creepy. And it actually is like it triggers something in us primevally that something is wrong here. Sensory deprivation is a form of torture. If you want to torture somebody, you put them in a small white room with no sound, no sensory stimulation. It's just not natural for us to be in those kinds of environments. Nature is not quiet, right? There's the rustling of the leaves or the sound of the wind. So I think we need to be really conscious that not all sound is noise. It depends on the task that you're doing to make sure that we have the right sound. I think people also assume falsely that this is about accommodating a small percentage of the population. When we started this, it was considered that 1 in 8 people were neurodivergent. Then it went to 1 in 7, then 1 in 6. Now it's 1 in 5, and it's been 1 in 5 for a while. I don't even think that's right. I think this is far more prevalent than we know. And it's not because there's this massive increase in people that are becoming neurodivergent. We are unveiling something that was probably always there. We just didn't really identify it. I think now kids are being diagnosed at a far greater rate. When they're younger, we're identifying this more and even that identification is starting to evolve over time. I think adults are starting to realize as their kids are getting diagnosed as well, but they've just kind of sucked it up their whole life and had to permanently mask.
It's amazing to me how much we are willing to tolerate because we just don't feel like we can do anything about it or we don't want to be different, or "well, that's just the way it is." And I think we are all just pretending that that elephant isn't in the room. But now all of a sudden, it's been revealed.
Patience Jones: You have spoken about workplace design as well as neuroinclusivity for audiences ranging from design professionals Design to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management. How do you approach speaking about topics that may be unfamiliar to your audience?
Kay Sargent: Really great question. I think we kind of have to assume that not necessarily everybody understands it, but they all think they do, right? Because we all know what we're used to. And we all kind of come at it from, well, this is the way I work, so everybody should work way. It's that double empathy problem. And the very first thing that we need to help people understand is that there are different ways that we function, there are different types of settings, and we don't all necessarily need the same thing. The way we design space, really over the last 40 years, I think we've tried to design spaces to accommodate the average person doing the average thing to simplify our ability to massively roll out space quickly. We've kind of forgotten about human-centric design. Who is that "average person" and what is that "average thing?" I just don't think that person exists anymore. And so I think we have tried to oversimplify things.
Again, everybody assumes that everybody functions just like them. So it's helping people understand that just because you experience something this way or you work this way doesn't mean other people. This argument cuts across so many things - the return to office argument. "Well, I can work from home, so everybody should be able to work from home." Not everybody is a sole practitioner researcher that doesn't interact with other people and is heads down, concentrating all day. Architecture is an apprenticeship model. You don't know everything you need to know. When you come out of college, you need to be sitting next to somebody who's been doing this and watch their behavior, watch how they handle the difficult client, watch how they solve that complicated detail that they're developing and be able to ask questions and interact and engage. I mean, I've been doing this for 40 years. There is not a day I don't learn something new from my colleagues. It's about embracing that we are not all the same, that we do do things differently and understanding that the environment has an impact on us.
Here's the analogy that we use. What we've done in the workplace environment in many cases is the equivalent of if the fashion industry basically said, "You know what, next year everybody is coming out with the same thing: a size 10 gray unitard. Man, woman, adult, child, like gray, hate gray, doesn't matter. That's what everybody is getting." In many cases, that's what we've done in offices.
We would never stand for that in fashion. But our offices and the way we work in our built in environment are far more impactful on us, yet we are willing to take just average, whatever somebody throws at us. We've got to stop doing that.
Patience Jones: That is a great analogy and it's also horrifying. It really sticks.
Kay Sargent: Yeah, I need to start buying gray unitards and just hanging them in front of people.
Brian Jones: This is your future.
Kay Sargent: You look great.
Brian Jones: As we noted at the top of the podcast, this was your first book. You are a prolific writer and researcher. How do you balance your role as director of Thought Leadership, Interiors with the demands of writing and publishing?
Kay Sargent: I don't really want to say this out loud. It was a lot easier - well, there were parts of it that were easier than I thought and parts of it that were far more difficult than I thought. The parts that were easier was writing it because we had eight years of research and material. It was piecing it together.
It was the interviews that I think were unique. It was the personal stories. So it actually didn't take that long for the initial draft to be written. You know, getting all the permissions, getting all the approvals and doing all the citation checks and all of that stuff, that almost killed me. Like truly almost killed me.
That was the harder part. But writing it - look, we were supposed to write 60,000 words. We wrote 90 with QR codes to most of the meaty stuff. And We didn't even talk about airports, justice, sports, healthcare, hospitality, all those other sectors that we're also incorporating all of this into. We could have. It could have been a four-volume set and that wouldn't have been a stretch. We just came out with a new study on our Seattle office that has biometric assessments and pre- and post- occupancy assessments that didn't even make it into the book. So writing it was not the problem.
Patience Jones: What have been the most significant changes to workplace design in the past 10 years?
Kay Sargent: The notion that one size fits all and the ability to embrace this notion that one size misfits all. I think the notion that even activity-based working is assuming that people are choosing where to sit based on the activity at hand. I actually believe most people choose where to sit based on the preferred environment. Like, I want to be closer to the window or farther away. I want to be in a louder space or a quieter space. I want to be in a buzzy area versus a secluded area. I want to be away from the loud talker versus I want to sit right next to the loud talker. I think we are not addressing enough how much the built environment and the sensory relation and those zones are impacting us. So the book is really the collision of all of the research that we've done on neurodiversity and all of our research over decades workplace.
And we really, we had to make what could have been a difficult decision, but it came pretty easily, quite frankly. We put a lot of IP in this book, and that is not common in our industry. It's not. We made a decision early on that we wanted to share this. Bill Hellmuth, our past CEO, was very adamant that this was an important topic. And our ExComm that rules the firm, several of those individuals have family members that are neurodivergent. They really have leaned into the fact that this is not about competitive advantage. This is about a moral imperative that as design professionals, if we are saying that we have a positive impact on people, we better be able to back that up and understand it. Leaning into the science of design, doing the research and investigating to find out what actually is happening and what is impacting people just seemed like the right thing that we needed to do.
Brian Jones: As we learn more about the human brain and how people best thrive, how do you see approaches to interior spaces changing?
Kay Sargent: I think that they're going to have a lot more options and choices and variety. I think people really need to lean into this notion that nowhere in nature is there a rectangular white box with a light strip in the ceiling. Yet we continually put people in those spaces and think, why aren't you thriving? It's not just about sustaining. It's about regenerative [space] and thriving for individuals in spaces. It's about having hyper- and hypo-sensitive [spaces]. A lot of people say, "Okay, we're going to design for neurodiversity. Let's dumb everything down so there's no excessive stimulation." Well, not even people that are hypersensitive want boring, dull spaces. They want areas that they can go to that can get some stimulation. They just don't want to be exposed to that all the time. It also totally ignores the fact that there's a lot of people that are hyposensitive. If you ask the average person what they think of somebody who's ADHD, they probably think about a 12-year-old kid running like crazy. You don't outgrow that. You learn to suppress that to some degree, but that need for stimulating environments or to be able to move and fidget and to be able to kind of engage with the space, to physically touch, it doesn't go away. We have to be able to create spaces that are both hyper- and hypo- and have various degrees of sensory stimulation. And that sounds hard, but in most buildings that's actually happening naturally anyway. In a building there are hotspots and cooler areas. There are busier spaces and quieter spaces. We just need to help people navigate to that and help them understand what their sensory intelligence and their sensory triggers are.
Patience Jones: Thank you so much for joining us. This has really been such a pleasure. I know I have learned a lot and I know that our audience will learn a lot also.
Brian Jones: Thank you.
Kay Sargent: Well, thank you for having me. It's a topic that we are passionate about and will continue to do research on. And that study I mentioned, we just posted it on our website. You can also follow me online. We are committed to helping everybody have a better understanding of this so that we can truly have a positive impact.
Episode Resources
Connect with Kay Sargent, FASID, FIIDA
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-sargent-53b2431/
• https://www.hok.com/people/leadership/view/kay-sargent/
Read the Book
• https://www.inclusiveworkplace.design/
Connect with Brian Jones and Patience Jones
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/graphicmachine/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-jones-graphicmachine/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/patiencejones/
