Damian Huneycutt, AIA, NCARB, ACHA — Healthcare Architect

What’s Your Spirit Animal? (And What It Says About How You Design)

One of my favorite questions to ask at the end of an interview is simple:

What’s your spirit animal and why?

It’s not a trick question. It’s not even one I use to evaluate whether someone is right or wrong. By the time I ask it, we have already covered the technical skills, the experience, the qualifications. This question comes last for a reason. It catches people off guard. And that is where it gets interesting.

Because how someone answers tells you a lot more than they think. Some people go with the obvious. Something strong, fast, or intelligent. Others pick something unexpected. Occasionally you get the honey badger and the explanation has nothing to do with being fearless or aggressive, which is usually the whole point of choosing it.

What I am really listening for is not the animal, although it can be funny on why your spirit animal is a Hippo,it is the why.

Are they thoughtful about it?

Do they understand their own tendencies?

Do they lean into who they are or who they think they are supposed to be?

That question has stuck with me beyond interviews. It has made me think about how we show up in our work, especially in design and architecture.

Because architects have spirit animals too, whether we realize it or not.

Some designers are like wolves. Collaborative and pack minded, instinctive, always aware of the team.

Some are more like hawks. Big picture thinkers who can zoom out and see the entire system at once.

Others are more like beavers. Methodical builders, focused on execution, detail, and getting it done right.

And then there are the chameleons. The ones who can adapt to any client, any project, any constraint, and still deliver something meaningful.

None of these are better than the others. But the best designers, the ones you want on your team, know what they are. They do not pretend to be something else.

That is where this connects back to architecture in a bigger way. Our work is inherently collaborative. Healthcare design especially demands it. You are balancing patient experience, staff workflows, regulatory requirements, budgets, and future flexibility all at once. There is no single type of designer who can solve that alone.

But when people understand their strengths, when they are honest about how they think, how they work, how they contribute, that is when teams actually start to click. It is also when design gets better.

Because authenticity scales. You can feel it in a space just as much as you can in a conversation.

There is a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde:

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

It is simple, maybe even overused, but it holds up. In interviews, in design, and in how we build teams, the goal is not to force everyone into the same mold. It is to understand what each person brings and how that translates into the work.

So if you had to answer the question honestly,

What is your spirit animal?

And more importantly, why?