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“Upskilling should be a personal motivation for everyone to further our philosophy inspiration, education and collaboration. We do not promote any one particular skill, but the team’s resilience and enthusiasm can be seen in each member’s professional or personal development.”

–         Ar. Aashish Karode, Co-founder, Design Atelier, New Delhi

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the architecture and design industry and has resulted in a delay in ongoing and future projects. No sourcing of materials, no physical inspection and missed project deadlines in many cases have incurred huge losses. Today, we share the insights of Ar. Aashish Karode, Co-founder, Design Atelier, New Delhi.

“I believe that those working from home will have several success stories for the design fraternity as a whole. We need to adapt and leverage transformative workflows for the efficient functioning of projects. On the other hand, we should prepare our teams to focus strongly on knowledge, skills, and behavior that makes us professional and relevant in the job market.

“Now that we are at home, we have to transport ourselves from the conventional brick-and-mortar and touch-and-feel design community to digital natives. We have a great team that knew that having remote access to our servers, files and version updates and controls were key to a real-time collaboration platform. We had to investigate and restructure our set-up to be as inclusive as possible to retain that competitive edge in the process. As an organization, we had always wanted to evolve our space into a tech-and-amenities-enabled office, and we had to quickly reconfigure ourselves and prepare ourselves. We wanted our teams to maintain high standards and share values with the help of the extraordinary working relationships they shared. We expected excellence in each design and mission, so our team had to measure up to that. We shared information and insights on Zoom, cloud, and BIM for real-time collaboration.”

“We now look forward to maintaining a workplace culture that promotes organization and engagement while fostering flexibility. We had the files prepared and shared with the teams before the lockdown was imposed, and that proved to be quick and efficient. However, some project resources were only available on servers and not online, so we were unable to reconstruct the datasets in the members’ personal computers. Online conferences have helped coordination and planning, but the actual task was to access the shared resources available from home, along with speedy computers, licensed software and high bandwidth.”

“Upskilling should be a personal motivation for everyone to further our philosophy inspiration, education, and collaboration. We do not promote any one particular skill, but the team’s resilience and enthusiasm can be seen in each member’s professional or personal development. Our team has produced two virtual-reality walkthroughs of our projects and a short motivational movie using video-editing software. Our website content was finally populated and the beta-version was launched at www.da-urbis.net.”