Essay

Introduction

In today’s video, I explain how you can hone your lateral design thinking skills, enabling you to design more effective, more inspiring and more innovative buildings. In understanding the mindset shift I discuss in the video, you will be better able to identify clues that will help to make your designs better for your building occupants — whether they be patients or medical staff within a hospital, students or teachers within a school, or employees within an office building.

The key is for you to develop a way of seeing your own work, and the work of others, through a unique lens that draws out not only inspiration, but actual design methods that work. Watch this video to see how you can begin to spot those pivotal design clues so you can find new ways to increase building performance.

Transcript

Maria Lorena Lehman: This is Maria Lorena Lehman. In today’s video, I am going to talk about how you as an architect can begin to develop more lateral thinking skills when you go about designing your buildings. So often in journals or books or even magazines, I see architectural building types broken down, where they are separated from each other, so in a discussion about hospitals a lot of different design ideas and regulations would be discussed separately from those design ideas and regulations that conform to the school category — and likewise with an office building category and so on.

So, often because of this, there is a categorization going on within architecture, and I wonder if there are a lot of missed opportunities, where the things that we are learning about advanced hospital designs can help to influence what is going on within school designs and vice versa. So, with the diagram here you can see hospital, school and office building types. Now, instead of keeping these as separate compartmentalized and dividing building types, why don’t we take a look at how we could learn from each of them, and those successful moments within each building types can help inform the others.

So for instance, learning which may typically associate with a school may really help those working in an office building, or those designing an office building. Similarly, learning can help the design of a hospital, because within a hospital and an office (while not so obvious because as a school where there are students learning, within a hospital there are patients and they have a lot of learning to do) — while they are preparing to go home, they are learning about their illness, how to take care of it and so on. Also the medical staff are learning as well, while working on patients, they are learning from each other, communicating, many times learning on the fly. Within an office building there are often projects going on where learning and brainstorming needs to take place, conferences maybe going on, other types of training, so what we learn within a school about learning and teaching can actually help hospital designs or office designs or a museum designs, and the list goes on.

Now to follow through on the diagram, within an office building what might you think of? Perhaps productivity? Efficiency? Well, productivity and efficiency can likewise inform and help a school to be designed and run better. It also can help a hospital to run more smoothly. And similarly within a hospital design attention can be paid to physiology where the design uses different elements to better take care of the patient from a physiological standpoint, to help them heal for instance. Well I think that physiology may extend into other branches or areas within architectural building types. For instance, by designing for student physiology, students may be able to learn better within schools. So suddenly, these different design elements and functional goals within each building type could be tied together and then that really helps to emphasize and magnify the positive effects of what different building types can do.

Similarly, physiology can help within an office building as well, this can help the employees work more effectively, efficiently, productively and perhaps even with less stress, so really this is about again developing more lateral thinking skills when you go about designing your buildings. And also it’s about expanding your boundaries, so if you are working on a hospital design, don’t limit yourself to just looking at other great hospital designs for inspiration. Try looking at what occurs within a school or an office building, if you are really working on this particular outcome that you are trying to achieve. So in the end you are adding to your design palette, you are learning about what makes great hospitals great, but then you are also able to look at other building types, understand what clues about those make them successful because, odds are, there will be learning going on within your hospital, there will be moments where efficiency or productivity are key just as much as the physiology that leads to healing for your patients.

So, expand your boundaries, look beyond your building type and this will take you a step in the right direction toward developing more lateral thinking skills as you design your building. Thank you for listening and watching.