In This Issue

PREPARING FOR A NEW NORMAL

We, like many of you, are eager to get back to having in-person interactions with our work colleagues (and, of course, our friends and family). At the same time, we too have grown used to a simplified morning routine, responding to emails from the couch, and, yes, sometimes wearing sweatpants during Zoom meetings. Shh, don’t tell! We also realize that the work environment won’t simply go back to “normal” by the simple wave of a wand. How could it? It’s actually much more complicated. Given that many teams around the world have successfully navigated a switch to remote work, what leverage do managers and corporate decision-makers have to entice their employees out of their home offices and back to the “real” office?

Some large companies (Atlassian, Coinbase, Dropbox, Facebook, Slack, and Twitter, to name a few) have already announced plans to allow most or all of their employees to work entirely remote forevermore. Even after the pandemic ends. Yet there is a big difference between the type of work these employees perform and that of industrial designers. The industrial design process is frequently reliant on in-person interactions and physical activities related to bringing ideas into reality: making things, testing things, seeing and feeling real materials, collaborative brainstorming, user testing, and so on. Yes, the companies mentioned above all have design teams, but their workflows and output are largely digital and service oriented, which can be adapted to distributed collaboration much easier than the craft of creating something physical.

Now more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve already seen the novel ways in which industrial designers have adapted to a virtual setting: from shipping samples and prototypes to home addresses to scheduling rotating timeslots for individuals to be at the studio to access tools and machinery. But with vaccines currently in distribution and a light at the end of the tunnel now visible, many big questions have started to emerge: • Do design studios need to adopt a more fluid or virtual setting? • Will creative collaboration return to pre-COVID standards, or will we adopt something new? • What methodologies from virtual can we learn from and apply to an in-person setting? • What will change from a team leadership perspective in the future? • How will operational processes and project management techniques change? • What can be done to ensure our team members are mentally and emotionally prepared to return to in-person work?

In March 2021, we synthesized these big questions and asked members of our design community “How is your design team/studio/office planning to return to work postCOVID?” Their responses, some lightly edited for clarity, are collected here as the main focus of this issue. It’s important for us to share our experiences, learnings, expectations, and strategies with one another so that we might emerge from the pandemic in a position to begin our “new normal” with efficiency, momentum, and success.

—INNOVATION Editorial Team