In today’s video, I explore how a patient room within a hospital can be designed as a narrative made up of a patient’s behaviors. By being able to orchestrate room elements within a hospital design’s patient room, you as an architect can bring building elements to foster healing by tapping into both the patient’s cognitive and behavioral processes.

As you watch this video, think of how you might tap into the resources with such a room, so that they coordinate with one another — yielding elements that are much more aesthetic, comfortable and effective — as they pull from each others strengths.

Video Transcript

00:10 Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman with SensingArchitecture.com. In this video, I’m going to talk about occupant experience, specifically looking at healthcare architecture and a recovery room for a patient, so the patient will be our occupant in this example. As you can see here, I’ve already drawn a very, very rough diagram of a typical patient room that you might typically see. In this upper hand corner, left-hand corner, might be a restroom area. Over here in the upper right hand corner might be a window with hopefully a view of some trees or nature. On this wall might be paintings or interactive video displays or televisions. Of course, this is the patient bed or central point where the patient spends most of their time. And we also have an area for visitors, which is all very important. And this, of course, is our main entry and exit into and from the room.

01:32 MLL: Now as you can see, there is already a narrative going on within this patient room. The patient has different activities with which they need to be involved, both things that they want to do and things that their medical team and doctors are prescribing them to do, usually to help them heal and keep their spirits up while within the hospital. Some of the things that are important for you as an architect to understand when designing for your occupants in this manner might be hierarchy and timing in conjunction with your occupant needs. And of course, as I said before, their needs might be what they want and what the medical staff thinks they should want and need.

02:35 MLL: And all of this leads them on their path to recovery. I think it is here where architecture often misses a beat, where the overall architectural solution tries to share all of these requirements and activities within one space. But what I think might be most interesting for you as an architect is to track the patterns in a story-like fashion where, for instance, with timing at certain times in the day, a patient might need to engage in activities of daily living. They may need help getting to and from the restroom. At other times of day, they may need more time for contemplation or peaceful thinking where looking at the view of nature has actually often been found to help patients heal. At other times of day, they may need distraction to watch television or interactive video displays, but similarly, the video displays could also serve to inform them and teach them how to take care of themselves and prepare them for their trip home. Likewise, visitors can be allowed in at certain times.

04:33 MLL: So the room is usually, today, in a one-size-fits-all standard state. But with transient architecture, I wonder how we can pull resources together within a room to really make each activity sing. For instance, the interactive television display might actually serve to teach them or inform them with activities and exercises so they can get better and more independent over time and begin to engage more readily in their activities of daily living.

05:37 MLL: So the idea here would be for you as an architect to begin to pull the different resources within the room; like the restrooms, televisions, interactive displays, views of nature, spaces for contemplation, visitor areas, patient bed, and of course, this involves room lighting, flooring, wall materials, ceiling materials so that they might become transient and work together in an orchestrated fashion to help emphasize certain elements within a room at certain times when the patients need it most. And this might help them to recover faster and better.

06:19 MLL: Thank you for listening. This is Maria Lorena Lehman with sensingarchitecture.com.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: bedzine | Flickr

When it comes to architectural design, most emphasis is placed on what happens within buildings while occupants are awake, active and being productive as they engage in their wide range of daily human behaviors. But as an architect, you must step back and ask yourself what makes all of this activity and behavior possible for your occupants? What helps them to maintain their proper amount of focus and energy while also being creative and productive as they engage in their daily activities — even down to a physiological level.

Well, a critical and important factor which helps humans to perform optimally is none other than sleep. And where is this mostly carried out? In homes, in hospitals, in hotels and even less obvious places like boarding schools.

While achieving good design in all of these places is important in terms of helping occupants with their everyday wakeful tasks and activities, it is also important for you to know that REM sleep during the night is critically important for your occupants to achieve in order to help make not only their overall health better, but also to maximize their function and outlook for the next day like creativity, productivity and so on.

Quote from Science Daily article entitled Memory Researchers Explain Latest Findings on Improving the Mind:

“REM sleep is important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later,” said Mednick. “This helps us to understand more about the benefits of sleep and to help people maximize their sleep schedules for optimal productivity in memory retrieval.”

How Might You Design for a Better Night’s Sleep?

When you think about adaptive architecture, you need to engage in the narrative and processes that make up your occupants’ daily lives — and then, within your design you need to not only account for their routine schedules, but also allow for variations within those schedules. Just as proper lighting is important within your design to harmonize with your occupants circadian rhythm, the olfactory, aural and touch senses can also be used within architectural design to help get your occupants to that deeper level of REM sleep during the night.

For starters, as an architect you may need to look at what obstacles are preventing your occupants from sleep and then get rid of those. Within a hospital, for instance, it is reported that good sleep is very difficult for patients to achieve because of the rolling carts in the hallways and the opening and closing of room doors during nightly patient checks. By just finding solutions for these seemingly simple problems, you as an architect can greatly contribute to helping those patients heal faster and better by simply giving them a better quality of rest during the night.

Within a hotel, we see a lot more option in terms of comfort than might typically exist within a hospital design. Within a hotel room an occupant might experience nice lighting to help them read a good book before bed, a well-placed television in case they need a distraction before sleeping, darkening curtains and filtering room shades to help prevent street light (or early morning light) from streaming into the room and waking the occupant up. And also, part of getting a good night’s sleep might be in the preparation — at some hotels, they provide nice robes, slippers or a “good night” snack simply to create a relaxation kind of mood.

As an architect, you should take the time to get to know your future building occupants — knowing not only what they do during the day, but also what they need to do to prepare for the night, and to achieve a good and restful night of sleep. Do not waste this incredible way to leverage your design talents. For, what good is the most amazing architectural design that can help your occupant be highly proactive during the day, if they are just too tired to make good use of it because a poor design helped them to get a restless night of sleep. Don’t let your design fall short.

Please Tell Me What You Think

I would really like to get your feedback on my post today, so please leave me a comment in the form below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter and Facebook followers by clicking on the “re-tweet” and “like” button at the beginning of this page.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Detail of the Parthenon | philos from Athens | Flickr

Buildings change through time. Not only do their materials weather, but their intended purpose can become altered by a changing society’s or culture’s needs. So, how do you design a building that is both timely and timeless? This is an age-old question.

It is important to stay on top of the latest trends that affect building design and construction processes, but that is not all that is important.

New advances are taking place in other fields. In the sciences, for example, researchers are unraveling great findings that both directly and indirectly will affect the way you design and how your occupants perceive your spaces. Such advances prove to be important because they impact how people live — this influences how they think, the choices they make and what they like to do.

IT’S BOTH COMPLEX AND SIMPLE

A timely design can reach timelessness by really staying free from hype and gimmicks. Form with no meaningful purpose or pure function with no attention to form and aesthetic are two sure fire ways to design architecture without true synergy.

To reach timelessness, your architectural designs need to be carefully thought out and your intentions need to encompass both the complex and the simple. These basics elude many building designers. Although they may seem obvious, they are often quite difficult to truly achieve. This is especially true the more complex a design is. (Think about hospital design as an example.)

REDEFINE THE FUNDAMENTALS

So often, architects are faced with the challenge to create designs that break a mold so they may be called “innovative”, “fresh” or “new”. But are they really timeless or universal? Perhaps they look “cool” from the outside. Perhaps they look “different”, but how do they actually feel for the occupant within them?

The perfect fusion between the timely and the timeless within a design is very difficult to achieve – particularly within more complex building types. Start with the fundamentals like…”How should these building programmatic requirements be translated and built so they feel right for the occupant as they journey through the space?”

Use limitations (like budget) as ways to help you push boundaries. With limitations come challenges and with challenges come opportunities to think outside of the box.

Look at better ways to improve upon basic human (and planetary) needs. Do this, while reaching for something innovative, but without forgetting the fundamentals. Then your designs will start to sing.

I WOULD LOVE YOUR FEEDBACK…

I would love to hear your feedback on this post today, so leave me a comment down below. And if you enjoyed it, make sure you share it with your Twitter followers by “tweeting” it using the re-tweet button! Thanks so much!

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: dps | Flickr

Image: dps | Flickr

The big challenge for architects designing concert halls is to design the architectural acoustics to meet the needs of varying musical styles. (1)

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM CONCERT HALL DESIGN

The design challenge of a concert hall is at first glance contradictory — to foster closeness and, yet, to surround listeners with the life and essence of a music’s sound.

Different levels of intimacy and aliveness vary depending on music style. What makes this even more difficult is that, intimacy and aliveness are very difficult to quantify — thus, design for. (1)

Such contradictions exist in other architecture types. For instance, hospitals must design to cater to as many patient needs as possible while striving to keep hospital costs low. In office buildings, the need for both individual work and team work is vital – the contradiction surfaces when considering how interconnected the two should be.

SOLVING FOR CONTRADICTIONS

Timing is everything (well, almost.)

A great hospital design could, in fact, help to meet just the right patient needs at just the right time in their healing process. This yields faster recovery and; thus, less hospital cost since patients stay for less time.

The secret is not to meet every patient need, whether they need it or not, but to meet individual patient needs at just the right time and in just the right way.

The key is to fine tune your design so you can orchestrate not just how it works, but when it works.

Instead of trying to solve two separate problems, find where they might interrelate — often, by getting to the root of each problem, you will uncover that the two are not as far apart as you once thought.

Often, what may seem to be a contradiction is really not.

(1) Thompson, Craig. Architectural Acoustics. Illumin.usc.edu.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image: Idrutu | Dreamstime

INFORMATION EVERYWHERE

The hospital of the “future” is just around the corner. Already, research is being done to create an “interactive hospital” (1) — also known as a ubiquitous smart space.

The first step for better hospital design is a shift in mind-set where computers need to be thought of differently — departing from the traditional “office-type” mentality.

You see, hospitals deal with all formats of information that need to be accessible anytime and anywhere within the hospital. (1) Instead of providing one computer per person, an interactive hospital would provide an array of computer embedded just about everywhere so information can travel seamlessly, wherever and whenever it is needed.

A PRO-HEALING ENVIRONMENT

As ubiquitous computing technologies come together to make medical smart spaces, it becomes possible for all kinds of medical devices to help with data and collaboration management. The first step is for hospital technologies and environments to become interactive — helping the medical team to do a better job, more quickly.

Here is a glimpse of how an interactive hospital might work:

“We are working on prototypes for creating interactive walls, ceilings, and floors, as well as embedding computers in hospital beds, pill containers, surgical tools, etc. We envision a hospital where clinicians can approach interactive surfaces anywhere and carry on their work. Some of these surfaces are small and handheld like PDAs (but are not personal), others are large like the one used in a radiology conference room, where the whole wall is one big interactive surface.” (1)

The beauty of an interactive hospital is that, if designed well, it can give the patient a much better healing experience. By creatively integrating ubiquitous and interactive devices, architects can fine tune healing environments through the patient’s senses, improving things like their physiology and mood — important factors when it comes to healing.

SAFER AND FASTER PATIENT RECOVERY

It’s all about the patient and their recovery. By maximizing the capabilities of the different medical devices found in the hospital, interaction designers can help with many of the problems and challenges hospitals face today — like medication errors.

Here is a telling depiction of what an interactive hospital bed can accomplish:

“For example, when the nurse arrives with the patient’s medicine, the bed is
able to log in the nurse, check if the nurse is carrying the right medicine for the right
patient, and it can display the relevant information on the screen, typically the medicine
schema from the EPR system. Furthermore, various medical sensors measuring things
like blood pressure, temperature, etc. can be attached to the bed and start using the onboard computer as a gateway to the basic infrastructure. Every bed is in itself a server
containing various information about its patient and can be queried from e.g. an EPR.” (1)

In essence, ubiquitous and interactive devices can greatly help the medical team to do their job. By fostering real-time collaboration between team members and optimizing the environment to promote safer and faster healing — hospitals will be taking a much needed step forward.

(1) Bardram, Jakob E., Hospitals of the Future – Ubiquitous Computing
support for Medical Work in Hospitals. Centre for Pervasive Healthcare.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Image photographer: Charles Davis Smith | Architect: RTKL Associates Inc. | Healthcare Design

It is no secret that hospital patients are influenced by their surroundings. Hospital design directly impacts patient health – in more ways than one might think. Today hospital designers are trying to evolve hospitals beyond their infamously sterile décor. Care is being taken to use color, nature and wayfinding to ease a patient’s hospital stay. The following are five ways hospital design influences patient health – where care should be taken to improve patient recovery.

1) SENSE OF PLACE:
In the paper, Is there a Psychologist in the Building by Christian Jarrett, hospital layout is listed as quite an important factor for patients. Going beyond simple signage, hospital patients should be able to have a sense of their location without ever feeling lost. It has been found that having a sense of place helps keep patient stress levels down.(1)

2) PRIVATE ROOMS:
Also important to hospital design is the frequency of private rooms in a hospital. Providing private rooms reduces medication error and falling instances.(1) I’m sure you can imagine that private rooms also make for better visiting with patients and their loved ones.

3) NATURE + ARTWORK:
Hospitals that include nature and artwork are providing for more positive patient experiences. Both nature and artwork contribute to patients having a greater “sense of well-being” where spaces lend themselves toward contemplation and feeding the senses.(1)

4) NOISE:
A major problem within hospitals today is noise. Often patients cannot sleep through the night as medical carts screech through the halls and doors open and close. Hospital designers should pay greater attention to acoustics within hospitals as noisy environments generate more stress for patients. Also, sleep is critical for patient recovery.

5) COLOR:
Use of color in hospital design has a multitude of uses. Color can help patients have a sense of orientation – where color is used to give different hospital areas a sense of place. Also, color has been known to be associated with mood. Using the right colors in waiting areas, examination rooms, hallways or patient private rooms can have a definite affect on patient motivation and stress levels.

All in all, progress is being made to design better hospitals. Much study and research is now underway to more completely understand what patients truly need. So often, it is the patient that never gets their needs heard during the design process. For this reason it is nice to know that healthcare design is now getting more attention and making improved headway.

(1) Jarrett, Christian. Is there a psychologist in the building?. The Phychologist. Vol 19 No 10. October 2006.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman