The use of computational medium for visualization and simulation in healthcare architectural design

The design of healthcare facilities involves the complex system in various spatial and temporal dimensions; it involves a wide range of functions, different kinds of users and activities, and various technical requirements. Understanding the complexity in healthcare facilities becomes important in order to ensure that the design could perform well to support healthcare services. This paper discusses the current development of computational tools in healthcare architectural design. The emergence of computational medium in architecture provides new possibilities in analyzing and understanding the complexities within the system of healthcare facilities. The computational medium could play an important role in the spatial analysis of healthcare design, particularly as the medium of representation, visualization and simulation. This paper illustrates the development of some visualization and simulation tools that could assist in understanding some aspects of spatial configuration of healthcare design, such as visibility and movement. The use of the tools could assist the analysis of spatial configuration of the healthcare facilities in order to optimize the performance of the spaces. The dynamic of computational medium provides a new dimension in understanding the complex system from multiple perspectives that can be used to provide feedback for future design of healthcare facilities.