The gap between conversation and construction is where we work. Nearly every project shown at HCD was planned five or more years ago. The ideas are proven. The question is how fast they reach the next project.

Steelcase report's headline finding: your stress response doesn't distinguish between a tough deadline and a tough room. Trigger it day after day, and the cost adds up.

Last Friday I spent the day at Uber's San Francisco headquarters for WORKTECH 2026, alongside workplace leaders, researchers, designers and technologists from Google, LinkedIn, Stripe, NVIDIA, Genentech, JLL, HP and more. And one question kept surfacing in nearly every session: What is the office for when AI does the work?

One Workplace brought together K-12 districts, community colleges, the CSU system, architects, and our partners at Steelcase and Smith System for a morning built around one question: what if wellbeing wasn't a room on campus, but the way the whole campus works?

Connection isn't a nice-to-have. It's how humans are built. That was Dr. Tracy Brower's message to packed rooms of One Workplace team mates, partners, clients and firends recently.

The multipurpose room has quietly become one of the most important spaces in K-12 design. It doesn't do any one thing exceptionally well. It does almost everything well enough, exactly when a school needs it to.

At the College of Marin, a new 85,000-square-foot Center for Student Success reimagines what it means to design for the whole student, consolidating the library, student services, flexible classrooms, and dining under one roof, set into a hillside with sweeping views of Mount Tam and the surrounding redwoods. In this episode, CCB sits down with Dr. Dana Emerson, Vice President of Student Learning and Success at College of Marin, and Andrea Gifford, Principal and Director of Interiors at Group 4 Architecture, to explore the participatory design process behind the building, how line of sight shapes a sense of community, and what happens once students and community members make the space their own. Listen in for a look at how education, architecture, and community come together around a simple, ambitious goal: serve the whole student.

Emerging Objects' ONEder Grant research, Under Fire, transforms two of California's defining climate threats, wildfire and extreme heat, into building materials that remember rather than destroy. Co-founders Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello share with us how they 3D-printed wildfire ash from California fires into a 22-foot tapestry, and how a foot-thick earthen pump house in the Colorado high desert holds a steady interior temperature through weather extremes with no mechanical heating. Together they explore the alchemy of turning ash into printable filament, the cultural memory embedded in earthen building, and why good design research has to leave room for failure along the way. Listen in for an overview of Emerging Objects’ research for architects, designers, and anyone curious about building for a climate-impacted future.

The gap, between the quality of care a healthcare organization delivers and the quality of care patients perceive, is one of the most consequential and consistently underfunded challenges in healthcare facility design. And it starts at the door.

Small rural hospitals keep entire communities alive, and they're quietly running out of road. In this episode, host CCB sits down with Aaron McKenzie, Senior Strategist, and Eric Peabody, Principal Analyst at Taylor Design's Cove Studio, to unpack their 2025 ONEder Grant research into one of healthcare's most underfunded problems: strategic planning for under-resourced rural and community hospitals. Through interviews with hospital executives across the country, the team mapped a layered crisis of financial constraint, recruitment chicken-and-eggs, and the surprising importance of narrative continuity in long-horizon planning. Their response: four lightweight, AI-enabled tools designed to give overstretched facilities teams, and their local generalist architects, a real fighting chance. This is research that meets communities where they are today.

Every spring, school districts face the same challenge: real facility needs, real dollars to spend, and not enough time to navigate traditional furniture procurement.

Hosted with partners Bridgitte Alomes of Natural Pod and Ashanti Bryant with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the conversations asked a demanding question: what would it look like if every space genuinely honored the communities it serves?

The 18th Annual IIDA Silicon Valley Culinary Challenge benefitting Interim Inc of Monterey was nothing short of incredible. Design firms from across the Bay Area brought their creativity and their culinary skills to life around this year's theme: Rooted in Community.

The question that keeps surfacing in every industry right now, whether you work in tech, finance, education, or healthcare: as we automate more, integrate more AI, and digitize more of how we work and live ... are we still designing for human beings?

What came through clearly is that physical learning spaces do something AI fundamentally cannot: they hold space. They give students somewhere to be that doesn't require a purchase, a login, or a screen. They provide a community to belong to.