Cureosities | The Future, Vol. 1: Intro
Post-COVID. The new normal. The future of work. The future of cities. There have been and continue to be many different ways of referencing the future after our shared global pandemic experience. Many very smart organizations and individuals with varied perspectives and experiences have taken a lot of time to analyze what this future is going to be, what it could be, what it should be. There is no shortage of articles, white papers, blog posts and TED talks on this particular subject, starting as early as April 2020. From the beginning we’ve been trying to comprehend what for many of us was incomprehensible - the complete upending of lives as a result of COVID-19.
For those of us that are office workers and could work full time from home, which was actually a significant minority of the working population, we left social networks and an approach to in-person office work that hasn’t significantly changed since the industrial revolution and were left to our own to figure out how to navigate our next steps, remotely working with coworkers, teaching our children, staying isolated and safe to our own best abilities to minimize the spread. It was an exhausting, numbing, scary time, and as humans, it’s our nature to study these unknowns and try to understand what they mean now and in the future.
Empty office space looking out over downtown Seattle.
But three years out, we still don’t have all the answers. We don’t know with certainty where COVID-19 came from. The lives lost are undefinable millions. We don’t know how this is going to affect individuals going forward, especially children who lost key social and developmental interactions in important phases of their lives. From my own experience, I can see the impacts of remote schooling on my children, where they’ve fallen behind the previous norms, but I don’t know what larger psychological impacts COVID had on them that wouldn’t have been there had they grown up without it. It’s hard to understand the impacts because it’s not scientific, there is no control to test against. We will never see that alternate timeline.
I am not a professional business strategist like those at McKinsey & Co or Boston Consulting Group, among others. My personal expertise is rooted in the strategy and design of the built environment. I haven’t kept count of the many office designs I’ve worked on, but there have been a lot, in addition to a number of public and hospitality designs, and these space types all have a new reality that we’re in a position to redefine. Bharat Khandelwal, the managing director and Senior Partner at BCG, does not mince words in saying that going back to old work models would be a momentous waste. We have an opportunity to rethink a paradigm that was originally built from an authoritarian approach to management and re-envision our work models in order to embrace purpose, trust and humanity and find the most creativity, innovation and happiness for the most people.
The “after COVID-19” is not defined yet. We are very much in flux. The ecosystem of downtown micro-economies in many cities are still struggling as workers eat and drink at home rather than going out around their office. Office buildings are still at around half-capacity as workers and leaders continue to work through how much in-office time is needed versus time at home.
My belief on the next iteration of work is that we have to look at it from many different perspectives. Employees, employers, office building occupancy, downtown vitality, local shop owners/workers are all deeply affected by how this return (or not?) to the office shakes out. Design can’t solve all the problems, but it can help leaders get the ball rolling in some instances and support change that might otherwise feel forced in others. I’m going to take some time to study these various perspectives, the many players within the micro-economy of work and our downtowns to see what insights I can find relative to the design of space and how it can define what comes next. Visualizing how these spaces can look, feel and function might help us reframe what the office is and how it can help us do our jobs better in this changed world we’re all inhabiting.
Stay tuned.