Opinion

In a brilliant bit of lateral thinking, two UK professors have analysed a series of strategies that help astronauts create work/life balance in the confines of their spacecraft – and proposed these as a model for remote workers everywhere post-Covid.

In this NPR City Club of Eugene broadcast on the future of work, Howard Davis and Frances Holliss evisage the transformative potential of ‘The Next Normal’ for work: expanded flexibility that has the potential to better support workers, families and local economies, and to significantly reduce waste, pollution and stress.

In this blog post, Howard Davis discusses the historical construction of an economic and social way of life and how this is being significantly challenged through the impacts of the present pandemic. Ideals centered around the ‘family’, ‘public good’, and the ‘office’ are starting to erode and transform, as academics and corporations, individuals and communities, are starting to interrogate the new normal.

Jeremy Porteus, Chief Executive of the Housing Learning Improvement Network, provides an outline of how ten years since the original HAPPI report, the ten ‘care ready’ HAPPI design principles can be recalibrated to incorporate ‘work ready’ adjustments.

In response to a recent article in The Guardian – ‘Covid will force us to reimagine the office. Let’s get it right this time’ – Howard Davis discusses important issues about home-based work that deserve discussion: why the ‘new normal’ will not – and should not – be the ‘old normal’; the connection between productivity and ‘weak ties’; and why we should be prepared to embrace an evolving and flexible approach to designing for the brave new world of post-Covid-19 work.

In the last several days, through the press and conversations with friends, Howard Davis been thinking about three criticisms of home-based work, some already mentioned in previous posts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed many people to work at home who are able to do so: the artists, consultants, and individual entrepreneurs of many occupations who had already been doing so, but also millions of people who had been working in offices. But the pandemic has also helped bring to light and emphasize the essential nature of work of many people who cannot work at home.