Technology doesn't quite cover everything

摘要

Covid-19 has forced us, and colleagues across the world, to change the way we work. We've had to adapt to entirely remote working and plan for a potential recession. Social media is full of stories of teams coming together via VC and cheerful declarations that the physical office is dead. Based on three months of this, our view is different. At the start of the lockdown we were extremely bullish. Our business started as individuals working remotely, often across different time zones - we wouldn't need a remote working adaptation period. No missteps here. We adopted cloud based communication apps such as Slack and Google Jamboard years ago. As we've grown as a practice and graduated to real office buildings we've kept those tools. They are essential to us. We would definitely recommend them for live interactive sketching and snappy conversations. But we have learnt that the previous truism of physical design interaction being at the heart of the everyday debate and resolution of the dozens of engineering challenges we face is a reality. Without being able to sit next to a colleague to sketch or point at results on the screen we are not as design fluent.