Covid-19: Its Impact on Home and Work From A Design Perspective

As we enter our fourth week of stay-at-home in New York due to the Covid-19, reality is setting in, this may be our new normal for quite some time. Last week, the NYS government announced schools and nonessential businesses must remain closed through (at least) the end of April. One of our favorite spring festivals, The Rochester Jazz Festival, is cancelled and will hopefully be rescheduled for fall. College and high school graduation ceremonies have been canceled.

As an architecture firm, our staff was always in the office or at a job site. Given the high degree of creativity and collaboration required, working from home was always the exception. How can you redline a set of drawings for a colleague to fix? How do you effectively pin-up a design for internal review? What if you need to send drawings to the plotter? It just didn’t seem feasible. Until it had to be.

Our team is now utilizing many online collaboration tools. Like everyone else, we are power users of Zoom. Not just to see each other on video, but to share and markup documents and drawings. We have discovered what things are important to discuss on the phone or video conference, and what things can be documented in an email or posted to Basecamp. We aren’t just making it work, we are discovering we can be productive and have more work-life balance.

But how do we make our current home environment better and what will happen when we can return to our workplaces?

As architects and designers, we thought we’d share a few of our perspectives.

Isaac Bracher

I always think of home as a sanctuary – a place to recharge and take refuge from the outside world – I think that’s even more applicable today and moving forward.  In terms of design, I can see people having an increased desire for higher quality materials, in particular those which are most tactile.  Open living spaces will continue, but with more focus on flexibility to reconfigure into smaller, more private spaces.  A perennial design tenet, a connection to the exterior and daylight will also be important.

Bridget Carney

Now that we are with our families 24/7 and our homes are also our workplace, I see a need for both personal and private spaces. They need to be flexible spaces that can be used to focus on either work or personal well-being. Garages, vestibules and mudrooms are more important than ever as buffer spaces to keep the dirt, grime and germs from coming into the house.

Christina Fluman

Working from home has certainly been an adjustment for my whole family. We have found ourselves converting common and private spaces into personal work rooms; dad in the dining room, mom in the den, and me and my sister in our rooms at our desks. Personally, these new circumstances mean that it is more crucial than ever to maintain a daily routine that helps to solidify the start of the day versus the end of the day – I find that working from home sometimes tends to blur those lines and have found myself navigating through spaces differently than if I were physically leaving to go to the office. Different rooms have taken on differing degrees of importance.

The one thing that has not seemed to be so easily replaced in all of this is the comradery of being in an office space working with people that you enjoy being around. I think that a lot of people feel this way, which is why I believe that in the future architects will not only be designing physical meeting spaces but also virtual meeting spaces. Imagine zoom but in first person VR and now imagine that VR space as something that we are actually able to design and alter depending on the type of meeting, number of people in the room, etc…it feels like that is one direction that this could all go and it could open up new opportunities for the entire field of architecture…the design of virtual spaces!

Narin Nuth

The time has come where working from home is no longer a decision made by independent freelancers and work at home professionals. The big difference now is that working from home really means you WORK FROM HOME. Living in a city where we can spare a room for a makeshift office makes it a little easier than having to convert your 600 s.f. apartment into a work/live environment. I think the ability to separate where you work and leisure is extremely important even if it's only separated by a door. 

From an environmental standpoint, being able to go outside during lunch whether its for a walk or to squeeze in yard work really allows me to reset for the rest of the day. Seeing lots of people outdoor really lends a neighborhood connection. 

Joseph Twomey

The need of a physical office is going to change. I think this event, although very tragic, is going to have small businesses re-evaluate how important their current office environment is and how having that family interaction during the day is beneficial. For me, I personally have enjoyed having the work time and seeing my family during the day and they have commented the same.

Although, some form of an office environment is needed for all of us to interact as a firm… in the future it may not require the same amount of space as the past.  The technology is here for remote connectivity, and this event may transform the business mindset of dedicated office spaces. I can see shared office meeting spaces really take off in the future.

Allen Rossignol

Working in a house with a large family, I’ve discovered the importance of having adaptable communal spaces for learning, work, or recreation. Dining spaces have become the classroom and the desk. Long term comfort can be an issue, however, as the table height can be too high for computer use and dining chairs weren’t designed for sitting for such long periods. More breaks are necessary or switching to areas with couches to avoid fatigue. I think in the future we’ll pay more attention to the type of furniture we select, for both comfort and flexibility.

With gyms closed, its important to have recreational spaces such as home gyms or outdoor gardens. In addition to staying in shape, exercising gives you time to reflect on things that might be important to you that you may not otherwise get to accomplish in a regular workday. Connections to the outdoors is important through large windows and front porches.

I’ve seen a huge return to the importance of our communities. Getting outdoors more often reinforces the importance of walkable neighborhoods (following the 6-foot social distance rule) and human interactions that are necessary in our day-to-day lives.

What will happen when we return to the workplace? I think we’ll see unused areas repurposed for home-like settings, areas you can go to take a break from work and connect with your co-workers or even meditate. In our office we have a lounge space I think will be used much more than in the past. I also think there will be more flexibility in the workday to go outside for a walk or to take care of personal matters.

What changes have you made to your homes? And what do you think work will be like when we all get to return?