It takes more than evidence to inform the healthcare architect

Book chapter, 2020

Today’s strong focus on evidence has not changed hospital design in such a revolutionary way as some EBD-proponents had foreseen. Also, other conditions have a crucial impact on successful design and to which we must pay greater attention. One of these is intuition. Some architects succeed better than others in their endeavor to design well-functioning and appreciated buildings. Allowing themselves to be led by their feelings, they acquire “information” to handle the design problems they face. That is why intuition is a tool for innovation and progress, one that precedes science and evidence. The second crucial condition is related to a design-driven dialogue. Design theory describes the idea where both the prerequisites and demands are created at the same time in the making of design proposals: an idea that questions the traditional linear planning ideology. In this way, tacit knowledge, which is a part of every profession, can inform the architect in achieving more complete proposals over time. The main idea is that the knowledge grows through use of different design artefacts. The design-driven dialogue forms a partly new role for the architect. However, today’s experience of this process is limited and is so far rarely the subject of research.