Rejecting the status quo when building future infrastructure

My experience growing up on a barrier island in South Carolina evacuating as a child from hurricanes led me to what I'm doing my passion today for civil engineering and design and sustainability. My family owned a construction company, and from a very young age, I remember sweeping up the job sites in the afternoons after school and always being around construction projects. Seeing the destruction after Superstorm Sandy really cemented in me that we need to change how we've been building for the last 50-100 years and do things differently. I remember sitting in a jobsite trailer as a new engineer saying, why are we doing it this way? And the response was, because we've always done it this way. And I remember thinking that, well, that's a good answer. Later learning that that's called status quo bias. And it's a bias that's really hard for people to break out of. But I study designers and design cognition and try to get them to think literally in a different way. We use a brain imaging device called functional near infrared spectroscopy. What it's measuring is change in oxygenated blood. So we can see how much effort it requires to solve the engineering design problem. What I'm trying to demonstrate is there are ways to do things differently and provide evidence for that. Oftentimes what I tell students is, you know, a 100 year storm, is that means there's a 1% probability of this rainfall event. Where did that data come from? It came from us looking backwards. If the future doesn't look like the past, we're designing the standards that don't really reflect where we're going. So, you know, what data are we using to make informed decisions and is designing the code today enough for these future kind of conditions? We're literally looking at after disaster occurs, how do we get people in homes faster and literally cutting homes from pieces of OSB plywood. So our model is the centralized, cut it and print it here, distribute it to warehouses across the country. And where you're closer to a potential disaster occurring. And then it can be deployed to a particular neighborhood or community that needs it. Yeah, it's really shaped kind of my direction of how do we do things differently so that doesn't happen again.