Coronavirus lockdowns will have a profound impact on how creative businesses work in future, according to architects and designers including Carlo Ratti Associati, BIG, Snøhetta and Pearson Lloyd.
Over the past couple of weeks a huge shift in office culture has occurred, with teams spread across multiple houses instead of one studio. This has forced architects and designers to adapt.
"The scale of this shift is just unprecedented and will surely lead to new ways of working," said Sheela Søgaard, partner at BIG.
Søgaard hopes that the studio will learn positive lessons from the current situation.
"We are learning new styles of management that depend on the ability to disperse assignments efficiently across team members and rely on their deliverables without as much supervision or guidance as normal," she said. "We are approaching this situation as an opportunity for growth for our leadership and BIGsters alike." "To make this 'new normal' more acceptable will require an extra effort"
In Italy, practices were forced to make changes to the way they work early on, as it became one of the countries to be most severely affected by the pandemic. A nationwide lockdown came into effect on 9 March.
Carlo Ratti, founding partner of Carlo Ratti Associati, told Dezeen the current situation reminded him of the promise digital communications brought when they were first introduced.
"Until a few weeks ago, despite having the technical capacit...