11: Aimee Burmaster Hicks

Join in today’s episode with our lovely guest Aimee Burmaster Hicks — Principal at Page Architecture firm at their Texas location.

Aimee specializes in space planning and interior design development for corporate and healthcare clients. Her leadership role with Page builds on her commitment and collaborative approach to her work.

“I like the idea of freedom within commitment. Being truly committed to my work allows me to take design risks, and the projects I work on are better for it,” Aimee says, adding, “Collaboration is key. Everyone has something to contribute to the project process.”

My favorite part of our conversation was the story Aimee shared about how in order to win a project, the developer asked Aimee and her team to design a hospital out of legos in two hours (without prior knowledge and in the developer’s office) to assess how well the team could collaborate. That and how Aimee came into healthcare design kicking and screaming and now she loves it!

Aimee realized at an early age that she had the talent and ambition to work as a creative professional. “Being an interior designer is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” Aimee explains. With that goal set, she prepared for her career by graduating from Texas Christian University with a Bachelor of Science in Interior Design, a program accredited by the Foundation for Interior Design Education Research (FIDER).

With her work, she takes great pride in applying lessons learned from her previous projects to add value to the next.

“Each new project brings the opportunity to build upon both my technical knowledge and creativity,” she says.

“A new project also brings the chance to work with new team members I may not have worked with before. I like this relationship-building because it allows me to expand my ‘go-to’ resources within Page. I really feel that each project I do is better than the last.”

Aimee’s portfolio of projects include the 250,000-square-foot Children’s Medical Center at Legacy in Plano; a 90,000-square-foot corporate headquarters in Dallas for Concentra; the 82,000-square-foot Baylor Surgical Hospital at Park Place in Fort Worth; the 63,000-square-foot Baylor Medical Center Uptown in Dallas; a 146,000-square-foot Hospital and 80,000-square-foot Medical Office Building for Forest Park Medical Center in Austin; the 450,000-square-foot tower, in addition to 45,000-square-feet of renovation of the Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa; and 29,000-square-foot Solomon Associate’s office in Dallas.

Learn more about Aimee and her gallery of gorgeous work at Page Architecture by visiting: http://pagethink.com.

A big thank you to our industry partner The Center For Health Design! Learn more about the incredible research, advocacy, and education work The Center For Health Design is doing at http://healthdesign.org. You can gain access to the Center’s Knowledge Repository which contains over 2,500 references and key point summaries on multiple topics in different healthcare settings by becoming a Center For Health Design Affiliate.

And finally, I’d like to thank the American Academy of Healthcare Interior Designers for their support of this show. Find out more about their certification program at http://aahid.org

In today’s episode you will learn:

• What it means to be truly committed to the work and how it allows for more design risks for better outcomes.
• The story of how Aimee and her team at Page Architects won a hospital project by being asked by the developers to design the hospital out of legos in two hours.
• What makes collaboration successful and what is most challenging about it.
• How it took Aimee five years to really understand the patient experience