A Practitioner’s Transition to Academic Researcher

Some of the Health Environments Research & Design (HERD) readership is aware that I practiced architecture for 30 years, principally designing hospitals, and that I have spent the last decade in academia at Texas A&M University, teaching graduate students about healthcare design and its relationship to environmental research. Fewer HERD readers may be aware that I earned a social science master's degree in organization development at Pepperdine and have more recently been pursuing further cross-discipline education at the doctoral level in nursing and healthcare innovation at Arizona State University. In my current dissertation research, I am studying the way critical care nurses navigate within the patient room and interact with features of the designed environment. I have so far spent more than 200 hr observing intensive care unit (ICU) nurses through entire 12-hr day and night shifts on multiple units. I will probably invest many more hours on two or more units before completing my data gathering.I have been reminded during these observations of the importance of variation in minor design decisions and their major impact on the functionality of a completed design. It is all too easy for design to become a bit superficial, rather like a broad outline, which covers the basics without providing for the full expression of detail necessary to completely support high functional performance. In an ICU patient room design, for example, the location of monitors, computers, supplies, alcohol gel dispensers, sharps disposal containers, trash receptacles, and the ability to move equipment items with wheels all profoundly impact nursing performance. Design for hand hygiene, room size, bed orientation, configuration of life support systems, and decentralized charting position powerfully influence nursing behavior and efficiency.During my active design career, I was always totally committed to learning from the users in a robust model of participatory design. Through observation, interviews, benchmark comparisons, and shared development of design alternatives, I always tried to fully understand the functional requirements of each part of the building being designed. Declaring design detail to be of importance should not be a surprising statement for most healthcare architects, design professionals, or serious architecture students. In my case, however, this has recently become much clearer.It has become clearer, in part because I have now been exposed to content outside my own original discipline of architecture. Courses I have taken in human factors and epidemiology, for example, have provided new perspectives for me, as have the many doctoral courses in nursing science, analytic statistics, and research methods. It has become clearer because my personal opportunities for observation and inquiry have evolved and become more scholarly. I have been making a transition from a role as an architect in practice toward a new role as an academic research scientist. These roles and others acquired along the way are now becoming integrated, giving me a richer, cross-discipline perspective. It has been, and continues to be, an interesting journey.Architecture StudentArchitectural education at many or most U.S. schools hasn't changed much in the nearly 50 years since I was a student. We spent a disproportionate amount of time in studio, based on a mixture of late 19th-century Beaux Arts and early 20th-century Bauhaus thinking, as if every graduate was destined to be a gifted artistic designer. We took a smattering of architectural history and theory, made an effort to understand structural engineering and the characteristics of materials, and had to sit through a professional practice course that was almost entirely about the owner-architect contract. We got nothing in the way of research methods, scholarly literature search, or connecting the results of research to design. It is still largely so in part because the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) has strict requirements by which a program can be accredited, and students can only enter the track toward professional licensure from an accredited program. …