Advancing Your Design in Times of COVID-19

I am writing this on March 16, 2020, while keeping an eye on the virtual summit organized by Singularity University “COVID-19 – The State & Future of Pandemics” (the schedule of this summit consisting of 3 days worth of lectures can be found at this link https://www.crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/register).

It is a very enlightening listen in every conceivable way, both scientific, technical as well as practical at the everyday person’s level. What I find particularly impressive is the notion of people and groups of people pooling knowledge and effort to pitch in and help with handling the crisis and seeking solutions. We are in this together.

We all want to survive as individuals, live our finest hour in terms of cooperation and self discipline and also survive as businesses, because truth is, money moves the world around and ultimately the ripples in the economy will have an equally negative impact on our lives as COVID-19.

The necessary social distancing makes many things difficult or outright impossible as many occupations can’t be carried out remotely. Others, though, can and should be conducted in different ways in such times: education via the web, medical services over the phone or internet in appropriate cases, etc.

In our industry, where people constantly want or need new homes built or older ones renovated, plans can be slowed down for a short or undetermined stretch of time as architects and designers may not be keen to go on site and meet clients. Those clients who are more hands-on and DIY oriented can still advance their projects making their own site surveys, data and idea collection and working remotely with a design / CAD professional just like me.

With now six years of experience in practicing my profession remotely, I can confidently offer my services to do-it-yourselfers as well as to businesses temporarily finding themselves short-handed. I have developed a number of documents that should help the DIY oriented to think about the project at hand: CHECKLISTS, MEASURING GUIDE, TERMINOLOGY and PROFESSIONALS and I am offering consultation over Skype and FaceTime.