We are in an unusual time marked by more than a little uncertainty about our future. Pondering the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our society, our economy and our profession can be overwhelming. Yet, times like this can also provide an opportunity to reflect on the paradigms and assumptions on which we base our work.
While many of the questions and responses raised by this pandemic can be confusing to sort through, they can broadly be grouped into two categories. First, given that a large segment of the workforce has been working from home for the past two months (or longer), companies will reevaluate remote work and the advance of the virtual space. We also find ourselves questioning the threat of future viruses as we assess the far-reaching impacts that COVID-19 has had on our way of life, our work, and the behaviors that comprise the two. Let’s begin by exploring the latter.
Will social distancing forever be engrained in our daily lives, or will it be a shorter-term phenomenon? If temporary, how long? The answer to this question is an important one, for society at large and, more specifically, for those of us engaged in professions devoted to designing, engineering and constructing places of human interaction. If social distancing is to remain a rule around which we build our social and creative interactions, this will have a profound impact on how we occupy space and how we work together moving forward.
The environments we have created up until this pandemic—which were conceived to foster rich interactions and allow for a high level of choice and flexibility—will need to be rethought. Indeed, if the behaviors we have sought to support—those founded on fostering connectivity, collaboration and ease of interaction—are no longer foundational in our thinking of environments, it raises the question: “Why would we even bother to convene in one space at all?”
One could argue that this change in mindset could lead to the return of individual workspaces or enclosed offices supplemented by conference rooms, as in the past. I am not sure this works. In a world designed to facilitate social distancing, what does a conference room or any space designed for gathering and collaboration look like? One scenario could shift users back to individual spaces for day-to-day activities. Then, when teams need to collaborate or coordinate, we use virtual spaces to avoid close contact. This seems preferable to shouting across a room to one another which, in addition to being obtrusive and impersonal, could result in potentially aerosolizing a virus should anyone in the room be a carrier. If each of us is to work within our individual boxes and use virtual connections to share outputs, wouldn’t we each want the freedom to choose where we work? That is, why bother to gather within the same four walls if we cannot truly be together within those four walls?