The Need for a Universal Translator in Hospital Design

Richard Lasam
5 min readAug 17, 2022

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Architecture, like any technical profession, has created and molded over the centuries a form of internal technical language. This “architectural” language, used to present and discuss the design of buildings, can get… complicated, to say the least. So complicated that it can alienate listeners from understanding how or why a building is designed in that way.

Explaining this to people in 10 minutes who have no design background will be an interesting experience

To be blunt, architecture is a concept that the very first human beings who felt like they did not want to get rain on their heads and/or be eaten by predators of unusual sizes being out in the open understood. So, they began to design and construct structures to protect themselves. Nowadays, architecture in some cases might as well be an alien language that only architects understand, due to the immense body of knowledge that society has accumulated.

Even within the architecture profession, the architects who specialize in hospitals and other healthcare facilities can cause even more confusion and difficulty in conveying information to other architects who do not practice this specialization. In a way, hospital design (or healthcare facility design? No one has sat down and given a final word on what we call ourselves yet) has become a sub-dialect of the architectural language. So, you can imagine the difficulty of presenting the design of hospitals to others (i.e., everybody else who are NOT architects), which is kind of ironic given that it is they (what architects will call “Clients” and “End-Users”) who will be the ones to use the structures being designed.

It is this idea, much like how somehow all aliens in science fiction speak in English, that an architectural “Universal Translator” can be so useful in the exchange of ideas between the architect and the people who will use the hospital. If everyone can understand each other better, a collaborative flow of ideas will become easier to achieve. Improving communication lines between the people designing buildings and the people using the said buildings will allow everyone to have a better hospital designed and constructed.

Also, so that meetings can also finish faster (just saying)

To give us the idea of how many groups of people are involved in designing a hospital, here is a list of the usual cast of characters:

· The Owner who… owns the hospital (they get the last word on everything basically)

· The Child of Owner who may or may not be an Architect (but has aspirations)

· The Executive Committee who decides what happens on a regular basis in the hospital

· The Government who tells us what we minimally need to do to get a permit to run the place

· The Old Guard Doctors who have had decades of experience in the running of the hospital

· The Younger Doctors who have new ideas about running the hospital

· The Medical Staff who run the day-to-day operations such as Nurses and Medical Techs

· The Administrative Staff who keep the paperwork running

· The Service Staff who keep the people fed and the hospital running

· The Security Staff who keep the hospital safe

· The Other Hospital Staff who never show up in meetings except the last one when everything is done (sorry, this happens more often than not)

· The Patients who need to be healed in the hospital

· The People who go with the Patients to keep them company and in good spirits (most of the time…)

· The People who happen to go into the hospital because… reasons

· The Hospital Design Architect who will design the facility

· The Other Architects who will also design the more specific parts

· The Consultant(s) of various specific disciplines that ranges from acoustics to the design of the exterior to landscaping.

· The Engineering Team who makes sure the hospital does not blow up and has lights and water when you turn it on

· The Project Management Team who keeps everybody on schedule

· The Contractor who will build the hospital (hopefully on time)

The same list as above. But more formal and architectural!

Now, that may seem like a long list but trust me that new entities join this crowd at random periods of the design process to make it all interesting. If everyone can understand what these groups of people (formally called a “stakeholder” in architecture speak) want for the hospital, you can then design the best hospital ever.

Thus a “Universal Translator” in terms of architecture will be in the form of an agreed baseline visual language, which may be composed of plans and diagrams (both drawn the old way and in 3D nowadays) that can be presented with colors and/or symbols representing the specific services and activities in the hospital, which everybody can agree on. In that way, everybody will be on the same page regarding the reading of the design — in effect everyone can understand the “architectural language” being presented.

An example of a design presented in a more easier to understand visuals. Colorful!

If such an idea can be achieved, a lot of miscommunication and passive/aggressive comments between people involved in the design, construction and use of the hospital can be avoided or at least, minimized. (It can also speed up the design and construction of the hospital, which may be important.)

The aforementioned “Universal Translator” Visual Language will be discussed in future article(s) as it is… a very long discussion.

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Richard Lasam

Architect Richard Lasam is an…architect, who has been designing hospitals of unusual sizes in the Philippines for more than a decade.