4 Ways to

Work
Together
When We
Can’t Be
Together
MAR 13 2020
WORDS BY HEATHER EMERSON & SIMONE STOLZOFF, VISUALS BY
KATERYNA ROMANOVA

It's not uncommon for IDEOers to make house

calls. Friendly, in-person conversations are one of
our most cherished tools—that kind of design
research helps us learn what people collect and
eat and carry in their backpacks. Social
interactions fuel the insights we use to do our
design work. What happens, then, when social
interaction is not good for us?

Like most organizations, we’re reckoning with how COVID-19 will change
how we do business. And as we do, we’re learning a lot from our community
—our colleagues living and working under complex, difficult circumstances;
our clients whose businesses depend on global transportation; and the
people we design for and with on a daily basis. 

"Constraints can breed a lot of innovation,” says Charles Hayes, a managing

director of IDEO’s studios in Asia. “As designers, how do we design our way
through this?" 

Here are a few tips based on what we’re learning:

1. Create a virtual meeting survival kit

How many tabs do you have open right now? We equate multiple screens
with fractured attention. But just because a meeting is being conducted
virtually doesn’t mean it can’t be designed for presence. An IDEO team
recently had to find an alternative way to run a 20-person workshop for a
foundation in Seattle. They asked themselves: How might we still
approximate the level of engagement of an in-person meeting? Better still:
how might we make sure this virtual workshop delivers on our client’s needs
—focus, alignment, and a set of actionable next steps—while keeping things
interesting?

Before the meeting, the team mailed a virtual workshop survival kit,
complete with “sleeping bags” for cell phones, mini-whiteboards for people
to prototype ideas, and physical takeaways to help the presentation resonate
off-screen.

A virtual workshop survival kit helped ground a 20-person remote workshop.

Over the course of the meeting, participants excitedly unwrapped items one
by one. It was a way for the IDEO team to show up in the room when they
couldn’t actually show up in the room.
2. Design rituals around tools

There are thousands of tools to facilitate remote collaboration—video

conferencing! brainstorming tools! task-management software!—but
perhaps more important than the specific tool are the processes teams put
in place around them. After all, a tool is only as good as its ability to deliver
on what the team needs. 

Take video conferencing, for example. A reliable video chat box can be a
Swiss Army knife to combat the woes of remote collaboration. But spending
an entire day jumping from one serious video chat to another is a recipe for
bleary eyes. IDEO teams around the world have been running experiments
in how video conferencing can be a tool to build culture and connectedness
in addition to getting work done.

For one, teams have been continuously changing their virtual video
backgrounds—everything from a football game to a family vacation photo—
to spark discussion and keep meetings fresh. Regular rituals like daily
meditation or morning coffee chats have been ported over to video. And
teams are using creative warmups—like a 10-second dance break or a quick
show-and-tell of an artifact from the home office—to kick-off meetings.

3. Empower local communities

When travel is off the table, IDEOers have had to find alternative ways to
learn from the communities for whom they’re designing. One approach that
has become particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19 is Equity
Centered Community Design (ECCD). ECCD is a process of
designing with—as opposed to designing for—a community.

For example, IDEO recently worked on a project to design a new lifelong

learning program for the city of South Bend, Indiana. Rather than rely on
traveling to South Bend to conduct research, the IDEO team hired local
“community connectors” and a researcher in South Bend to conduct
interviews, share prototypes, and co-design with the IDEO team remotely.
Now that many cities are sheltering in place, even local communities will
have to work remotely. That makes it all the more important to enlist those
with hyperlocal context and lines of sight, ensuring there is sensitivity and
flexibility around immediate needs. By designing themselves out of the
room, the IDEO team received a level of honest feedback they may not have
been privy to if they’d been physically present. This method isn’t new, but as
movement becomes constrained, it’s even more important to engage local
networks to be the eyes and ears on the ground.

4. When you can't do, learn

How long have you been putting off learning that skill? Cleaning up that
code base? Building that website? When one door closes, listen for the creak
of another opening. Travel constraints can be an opportunity to take a deep
breath, hunker down, and try something new. Across IDEO, designers have
been using these extenuating circumstances as an opportunity to gather
digitally and learn. “We have experimented with a number of things,” says
Brian Chien, a director in our Shanghai studio. “Some worked well, and
some definitely didn’t.”
Whether it’s prototyping a remote brainstorm, trying out a new
tool, or building something by hand, the disruption of your normal routine
can be an opportunity to learn something. And if you already have the skills,
teach! Designers in our Tokyo office are webcasting tutorials for young
design students, sharing skills with those who aren’t able to attend an in-
person workshop. What if, when it’s inadvisable to move from place to
place, organizations took what they’re saving in travel expenses and invested
it into L&D?

At IDEO, we will always believe in the alchemy of creative minds bouncing

off one another in a shared space. But COVID-19 has pushed us to get even
more comfortable with digital. And while we know necessity is the mother of
invention, we still have much to learn—especially from other companies
who have been at the forefront of remote collaboration for years. 

Of this we’re certain, says Arlin Tao, a senior director in our Shanghai
studio: virus aside, remote collaboration is the way of the future. “I think the
only thing that most people agree on is when things go back to normal, it's
not going to be the normal that we were used to before.”