Design requires face to face human interaction

Ar. Khozema Chitalwala – Principal Architect and Designer at Designers Group in conversation with Realty+ shares an architect's challenges of working from home.   In view of the current health crisis, Work from home (WFH) has become almost a necessity. How are you managing the situation? Have you implemented WFH in your firm? Design is one such work process where face to face human interaction is of utmost significance. As this interaction has been eliminated from our operating system to a great extent due to corona crisis and work from home policy we had to opt for, we are definitely facing a lot of challenges. Fortunately, in the current scenario where technology has taken a lead upon our lives, we are always connected through electronic mails and other cross platform instant messaging applications like WhatsApp which aids in providing the ease of un-intervened communication. We have obviously implemented work from home looking at the current state of public health emergency in Maharashtra and all over the world. The only demerit we found in our process was that we have a local server in our office, and we anticipated a 5 day close-down initially, therefore everybody pulled out a restricted amount of data from the server which could suffice the said time period and now we don’t have enough resources to pursue relevant piece of work. According to you, what are the major challenges that offices face in WFH? The most crucial challenge is the installation of a monitoring system where we can surveil the work from home procedure and comprehend the deliverables that are achieved. Since this procedure is very new for us, we are still experimenting on how this system can further operate. Also, it is a great sense of opportunity for us to understand that we need some more specific resources to make work from home successful in case it is ever required in future. The corona crisis has opened up a new arena for us in terms of expansion of our office domain in order to take it to a global level. Any success mantra related to tips, tools, techniques you would like to share for WFH? I am mostly focussed on researching on iCloud cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple Inc to incorporate it in our work system further. Also, I am trying out different monitoring systems for further accessibility. I want my team to have a positive mindset while these crucial times of crisis so that we are all together in this, functioning on the same wavelength.