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Remember the good old days when a big part of the creative process was sitting around a table with a group of peers, sharing ideas, and riffing off each other’s iterations? Since the world went remote, designers have tried to replicate that same energy—but it doesn’t always translate on a Zoom call.
“It’s very challenging to produce creative work in a pandemic environment,” says Ben Watson, chief creative officer, Herman Miller, Holland, Michigan. “It is difficult to make decisions together, and everything takes so much longer. What used to take two days now takes months.”
There’s no doubt it’s been difficult for designers to find their creative mojo while working in isolation. But the most innovative teams are leaning into the constraints that the pandemic has put on them, and actually unearthing new ways to engage with each other and their work.
“Tragic times can be a rebirth for creativity,” says Meena Krenek, IIDA, interior design director and principal, Perkins+Will, Los Angeles. “You just need to find new ways to build your creative confidence."
Adventures in Innovation
For Todd Heiser, the pandemic was an opportunity to slow down the pace of the office and encourage people to use that time to explore. “We’re thinking about what excites us about design, and we’re putting ourselves in unexpected places to inspire new ideas,” says Heiser, co-managing director at Gensler, Chicago,
That has led to several “innovation experiments”—putting young designers in a position to expand their role beyond their current capabilities. It sets the stage for next-gen talent to bring their ideas to the forefront—and helps the firm create opportunities for leading-edge design. “Now is the time to think about who we want to be in the future and what we need to do to get there,” he says.
In weekly virtual meetings, the staff gathers to talk about everything from new projects to what members are doing to support their communities. Heiser also has managed to find some safe compromises to reconnect, occasionally hosting small “pizza in the park” events where a few team members gather to sketch. “We have to be six feet apart, not 60,000,” he says.
Some teams have amped up the technology to maintain that connective tissue. Perkins+Will, for example, hosts peer reviews for designers around the globe, letting people share and build on each other’s ideas. “It makes everyone feel connected in the firm on many levels,” Krenek says.
Still, her team found it can be difficult, if not impossible, to share and iterate designs across screens. So it adopted virtual whiteboard software that lets people share ideas or drawings, and leave them up for others to view, respond, and add their own ideas. “It is a way for divergent thinking and to share ideas and to let them simmer, like we would in an office project room,” she says. “That’s an important part of the collective and innovative design process.”
