Designing Care, Not Just Buildings: Healthcare Design and AI
Release Date: 08/19/2026
Prioritization Beats Productivity: Autonomy, Appreciation, and Culture
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Firms promote their strongest technical people into leadership and then give them almost no training. When a team struggles, leaders often blame the team. Amanda Van Der Heiden has seen this play out across dozens of organizations, and she argues the problem usually starts with how people are being led. Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make core values stick after the launch. They cover how to adapt your leadership style without losing yourself, and what has to be in place before a leader can hand over real autonomy. Amanda explains...
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Nobody at Work Is Your Friend: Relationships, Boundaries, and the Right Fit
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Every career advice list says to protect your relationships. Almost nobody explains what that looks like day to day. Julia Hurley has built a real estate business, a political career, and an athlete management company on relationships, so she knows the how. Julia and Bryce compare matchmaking in real estate and recruiting, and why buyers and candidates are both getting choosier. Julia explains how she teaches college athletes to be the CEO of their own lives by separating the people who support them from the people who manage their money and careers. She shares her rule of thumb for rental...
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Leadership Is a Craft: High-Agency Leadership in AEC
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Most AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft. Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a 20-person firm and sold it after 12 years. He explains why leading highly technical experts calls for high-agency leadership instead of command-and-control. He walks through the five levels of his...
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The Leaky Bucket: Why Women Leave HVACR and What Leadership Can Actually Fix
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Bryce just got back from Women in HVACR in Indianapolis, where she spoke to a room full of owners and managers about a number that should keep them up at night: women are leaving the trades at roughly three times the rate they are getting hired into them. Every job fair booth, every high school program, every recruiting push is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. This is not a DEI session. There is no slide arguing that diversity is good for business. This is a retention conversation built for the owner who has one woman on a crew of nine and cannot figure out why she is...
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The Four Rungs on the Ladder: Why AEC Firms Hire Women and Lose Them Anyway
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Barb Allen spent 20 years on commercial job sites, starting as a carpenter apprentice in 1997 and working her way up to superintendent. She was the first woman her company had ever hired out of college for that track. She left the built environment in 2022 after a meeting where leadership told her she was "difficult to work with," then admitted nobody could say how. That meeting became a book. In OneLadder to Leadership, Barb names four gender specific challenges as rungs on an unsafe ladder: missing, broken, sticky, and slippery. In this conversation she breaks down all four, tells the story...
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Architecture as a Society-Making Tool, Told From a War Zone
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Architecture is usually discussed as a service. A client has a need, a firm delivers a building, everyone moves on to the next project. Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni makes a harder argument. She says the built environment is one of the strongest forces shaping whether people in a place trust each other, and that the consequences of getting it wrong can take generations to show up. She would know. Marwa is an architect based in Homs, Syria, who stayed through the war and wrote about what she was watching in real time. In this episode she and Bryce talk about how decades of zoning and redevelopment...
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Burned Out and Anxious? What Your Food Has to Do with It and all the Food Recalls
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Episode Summary:In this enlightening episode, we welcome Valerie Hawkins, a dedicated nutritionist and self-concept coach specializing in helping women tackle anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm. Drawing from her extensive background as a working mom and former engineer, Valerie shares her personal journey through the challenges of anxiety and burnout, offering valuable insights into how nutrition can significantly impact mental health and overall well-being.
Valerie’s transformative
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Super-Architect: Craft, AI, and the Future of the Profession
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Architects have been losing ground for years, and the industry keeps explaining it away with fee pressure, schedule pressure, and software. Beau [Last Name] has a less comfortable answer. He says the profession's own craft has declined, and that decline is exactly why architects keep getting moved further from the decisions that matter. His case runs like this. When drawings are incomplete and coordination is loose, somebody has to fill that gap, and lately that somebody is the builder. The builder absorbs the risk, then reasonably takes the authority that comes with it. Beau and Bryce get...
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Stop Playing Small: How a Clear Vision Unlocks Your Career and Life
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
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Designing Care, Not Just Buildings: Healthcare Design and AI
Women in AEC: Wine After Work
Great healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operational efficiency with genuine, patient-centered care. We get into the human details and the hard tradeoffs. Why she starts every project by leaving her ego at the door. How ESa levels the room so the...
info_outlineGreat healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operational efficiency with genuine, patient-centered care.
We get into the human details and the hard tradeoffs. Why she starts every project by leaving her ego at the door. How ESa levels the room so the nurse's voice carries as much weight as the CEO's. What she'd change about sterile, all-white healthcare spaces. And how AI has earned a real place in her workflow, from generating exterior concepts to building a data-backed space program in hours instead of weeks.
This one is for architects, healthcare and AEC leaders, and anyone curious about where design and technology are heading. It's a thoughtful look at building spaces that serve people first and still hold up for the next 30 years.
About Kristin Green
Kristin Green is a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville. Known for her collaborative approach, she works closely with design teams, clients, end users, and consultants to guide projects from concept to completion while preserving the integrity of the design vision. A University of Cincinnati graduate, she is skilled in 3D software and driven by the belief that great design should be functional yet beautiful, inspiring, and timeless. Her process starts with intentional listening, so that the spaces she creates reflect the people and stories behind them.
What We Cover
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Introduction and Kristin's path from Cincinnati's co-op program to healthcare design
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Why ESa's single-office culture in Nashville shapes how the work gets done
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Intentional listening and the visioning session that starts every project
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Leveling the room so end users, not just leadership, shape the design
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Balancing emotional patient experience with operational efficiency
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The small details that change everything, from daylight to washers and dryers on the floor
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Emerging trends: hospital robots, pneumatic systems, and AI-enabled patient monitoring
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How ESa thoughtfully integrates AI, from concept generation to data-backed programming
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Preserving design vision across years, consultants, and team turnover
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The Arthur M. Blank Hospital and designing for timelessness over trends
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Where to find Kristin and closing thoughts
Key Takeaways
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Listening beats telling. The best healthcare projects start with a visioning session where the design team leaves its ego at the door and hears what actually matters to the people who will use the space.
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Warmth is a design decision. A facility can be cutting edge and still feel human, through daylight, color, and details that fight the sterile, institutional default.
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AI is a curator's tool, not a replacement. Kristin uses it to generate thousands of concepts and to build data-backed space programs, then applies human judgment to what's real, buildable, and right for the client.
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The first design is rarely the final one. Collaboration and early contractor pricing often produce a better, more cost-effective result without losing the intended look.
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Design for decades. Timeless choices matter most in buildings that may not change for 20 or 30 years.
Resources + Links
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ESa website: https://esarch.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/earl-swensson-associates/
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Career Collective: https://www.mycareercollective.com