Healthcare Architecture: How to Attract the Best Talent
Healthcare facility design poses some interesting problems for the healthcare facility designer. Unfortunately, these “interesting” problems are not of much interest to architects in general, who look upon the field as somewhat technical and dry.
Thus it is difficult to attract bright young architects to visit this field of endeavor. They can be recognized during their last year in architectural school as the one’s who choose “Hotel and Casino at Mumbai” to showcase their design skills. I guess it’s more fun to draw a blackjack table in plan than a CT scan. It is, however, a lot more difficult to draw a CT scan in plan than a blackjack table. My point is, it’s tougher to design healthcare facilities, both functionally and aesthetically, the building form resists your efforts to massage it into something pleasing to the eye while maintaining functional discipline. If “Hotel and Casino at Mumbai” were to have an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with “250-Bed General Hospital Anywhere”, there are no prizes for guessing who will blink first. Why then doesn’t the tough going attract the tough guys?
Hey you, out there…got an answer for that one? I think I have. It’s the lazy ones who’re designing the museums, ambient light being only one of a horde of design factors the healthcare designer faces. The tough going is attracting the tough guys (and gals), they just don’t seem to know it! Any competent healthcare designer can design excellent apartments, malls and office buildings with the pencil in his/her butt, what are all you guys/gals out there doing? Get real…
Tom Peters, in his “Essentials” series book “Talent” says:
Use quirky, energetic and disobedient talent to create your Primary Competitive Advantage.
We have in our office a girl we fondly refer to as Prats the Brat (Pratiksha) who comes and goes as she likes, sometimes she’ll land up for lunch, at other times she’s working till late at night, she took a cut in salary to join our firm, she’s doing a correspondence course in Project Management while working, she doesn’t listen to anything I say (I wrote that just for dramatic effect?) but she keeps her schedules and makes a damn good job of it. She’s a healthcare designer who knows she’s tough.
Hey you, out there…how tough are you? I talked about “competent” healthcare design a little while back. Competence went out of style with the Beatles…Aerosmith is talking “mastery”. Ten years back you needed to “know the ropes”…now you need to know how to bungee jump. You have to re-imagine yourself as an individual – retail design sucks big time. Joining a healthcare design firm without knowing how to spell “healthcare” can be as scary as hell…Jon Bon Jovi in his latest album “Have a nice day” sings:
“Every new beginning is some beginnings end…”
Bon Jovi as a band walks tall and talks tough…just like healthcare facility designers. It’s about team work, just like playing music; you got to know when to hold the beat and to know when you can jam…
Hey you, out there…can you rock ‘n roll? Healthcare facility design is rocking design; you have at many times to put your values on the line your pencil draws. When was the last time you were confronted by a moral issue when designing a shopping mall? (You say you are continuously confronted by moral issues while designing shopping malls?) Then you need to give this different, this happening field of healthcare architecture a try.
Talent – develop it, be it. Make that guitar scream, all of us are stars, we just need to find our space to shine.
Like a crazy diamond.
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