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Big Heart Intelligence in Healthy Workplaces Chapter j 13 251
industry is increasingly aware of the importance of integrating hardware and
software, BHI encourages an integration of form and flow in architecture and
design with the goal of creating spaces that nourish vitality, joy, and happiness
for everyone. Here are two examples of how BHI can be practically introduced
at an early stage in the planning of such projects.
EXAMPLE 1: BIG HEART INTELLIGENCE IN THE DESIGN OF
HOSPITALS AND HEALTH CARE FACILITIES
Most hospitals in the United States and other industrialized countries at least
from a patient’s perspective are sterile, cold, and fearful places, where joy,
kindness, and cheer appear only seldom, and when they do, they appear as
transitory rays of sunshine. Most hospitals are businesses for profit measured by
bed count turnover and other hard metrics. They are designed as venues to treat
serious illnesses or injuries, not to accelerate healing and transformation. They
mirror accurately the values, economics, and infrastructure of contemporary
medicine.
It is not surprising that burnout is rampant among physicians, nurses,
caregivers, and supporting staff in most modern hospitals and health care
facilities, and that burnout often manifests among caregivers in soaring rates of
cardiovascular disease, suicide, and other most serious maladies (Ncbi). Burnout
of caregivers necessarily translates into deteriorating quality of care of patients,
especially the elderly and the poor, who are also most vulnerable to nosocomial
infections. At the same time it is estimated that caregivers confer annually over
$500 billion in services to the civil society, a significant amount of which is
uncompensated. Without their contributions, it is fair to say that modern society
would collapse (States).
In recent years a global movement has developed to transform hospitals
and health care facilities into healing and hope. One example is Health Care
Without Harm ean international coalition of visionary green hospitals
(Noharm). In such hospitals, BHI will find receptive and fertile soil.
Explorers Wheel: Inspiration, Conception, Design
At the earliest stage of a project the Explorers Wheel offers a systematic way
to connect wide domains of knowledge and experience (Alliancesfor
discovery-B). It can help architects and designers solve problems for clients
in a new and powerful way that we call BHI-inspired “intertidal” thinking.
Here is how practically an architect or designer might use the Explorers
Wheel.