HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference
Greetings from our annual conference, HEALTHCARE DESIGN, at the Gayord Texan resort in Dallas. I’m here with about 3,100 other healthcare and design professionals, product manufacturers and other vendors, students, educators, and consultants allied to the field. It’s our biggest conference ever, which is a testament to the growth of the healthcare design industry, and our collective efforts to advance the field of evidence-based design. Thanks to our conference partners, Vendome Group and the AIA Committee on Architecture for Health, for helping to make this happen.
Last night, I had the pleasure of interviewing CHD board member and interior designer Jain Malkin in front of about 120 attendees at the IIDA fundraising dinner. Actually, it really wasn’t an interview, because all I did was just ask her one question (”How did you get your start in healthcare design?”) and she launched into this amazing, highly amusing 30-minute tale of her early beginnings in the field.
For those of you who don’t know Jain, she is probably the “godmother” of healthcare interior design. Her projects have set the standards and won awards and been published everywhere. She has written three books, one of which is the “bible” for design students looking to get into this field. She speaks everywhere and is constantly absorbing new information and sharing it with others. She is a larger than life personality who is curious about everything, a perfectionist (in a good way), and incredibly passionate about healthcare.
The amazing thing about Jain is that she is a self taught designer. Her degree — from the University of Wisconsin — was in psychology. Needing money and not sure what to do, on a whim, she applied for a design job at Flad & Associats in Madison, and got it, despite the fact that she knew nothing about how to be a designer. She also worked for an office furniture dealer in Minneapolis, and then for her brother’s architectural firm in LaJolla, CA (which did medical space planning).
Before starting her own healthcare design firm, she spent a year going around to hospitals and observing what went on in them — material that eventually became the basis for her first book on medical and dental space planning. Of course, I have left out all the bizzare anecdotes that Jain told which had us all laughing out loud (If she lets us share the tape with you, we will), but you get the idea.
I am truly fortunate to have known Jain for almost 20 years and encourage you to go hear her speak if you ever get the chance. Her latest book, A Visual Reference to Evidence-Based Design (which is being published by The Center for Health Design with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be out in January 2008.
Read Natalie Zensius’s blog post on Jain’s book.
Read a review of Keynote Speaker Don Norman’s opening address.