Healthcare Design - September 2020 - 30

HCD 10
E D U C AT O R

LISA LIM
Assistant professor, College of Architecture, Texas
Tech University (Lubbock, Texas)
WHO SHE IS: Lisa Lim, PhD, began teaching while she pursued her doctorate at Georgia Institute of Technology, assisting Craig Zimring, director of
SimTigrate Design Lab, on courses focusing on evidence-based design and the future of healthcare design. She joined Texas Tech's College of Architecture in 2018,
where she now teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios and elective
courses as part of the design and health certificate programs-all while putting in
plenty of time as researcher and designer, as well. Her primary focus is on providing healthy environments with an emphasis on building users, with courses exploring empirical and analytical approaches for understanding both space and
the people in it.

Visual Power software

30

SEPTEMBER 2020

INDUSTRY IMPACT: Lim spent the past year working to share the knowledge
she's gained, speaking about the results of the Functional Scenario analysis
approach at several conferences and publishing results from her team-based
care studies in peer-reviewed journals including Health Environment Research
and Design, Health Care Management Review, and Journal of General Internal
Medicine (it also informed Mayo Clinic's own design guidelines). And in her
core role as educator at Texas Tech, her students benefit from her rigor, as well.
In addition to her courses, she also advises several undergraduate and graduate
students who work with her as research assistants. Through these experiences,
she teaches students the role of research in design and their role as a designer/
researcher, providing valuable context to how they might solve similar industry
challenges in the future.

HCDMAGAZINE.COM

IMAGE BY LIM

YEAR IN REVIEW: To help develop her students, Lim starts by providing them
exposure to real-world environments where they can interact with healthcare
professionals for a better understanding of users' perspectives. Students talk to
providers, ask questions, and receive feedback on their projects-a process that
allows her curriculum to evolve based on emerging questions and topical issues.
Furthermore, she establishes collaboration with healthcare design firms, allowing students the opportunity to visit projects, understand drivers, and realize the intent behind designs. However, it's her advocacy for and involvement in
research studies that truly stand out in the past year. Lim has focused her recent
research efforts on the effect of healthcare facility design on the teamwork and
well-being of healthcare professionals. For example, she collaborated with Mayo
Clinic to investigate how the design and layout of a facility can support communication and awareness of healthcare professionals as well as its link to staff stress
and burnout. With expertise in spatial analysis, she also developed a computer
software called Visual Power that quantifies interpersonal visual relationships
among users of a space, furthering analytical capabilities of the field. Additionally, she analyzed and evaluated various healthcare settings from the perspective
of users by using what's termed the "Functional Scenario analysis approach"that
she developed with her colleagues. This method quantifies spatial affordance
for the needs of users, such as patients, providers, or family members, in various
healthcare settings, enabling evaluation and comparison of design options.
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Healthcare Design - September 2020

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