COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on the way people work, and therefore has consequences for the ways companies need to look at workspaces and how employees work in them. Northeast-based design firm Stewart-Schäfer, a multidisciplinary architecture and interior design studio led by James Veal and Christine Stucker, announces the launch of a second enterprise to address office health and safety issues and create sustainable solutions for the future. DistanceDesigns™ will provide services and resources to create agile workspaces that help prevent disease spread and promote health, while also increasing creativity and productivity through data-driven design. In a recent survey, they found more than 69 percent of respondents would like to see design changes in their offices beyond health and safety measures. Pioneering the design-led concept of agile working, DistanceDesigns’ goal is to create lower density hybrid workspaces that are optimized for specific tasks, empowering employees to work where, when and how they choose and enhance their performance and do their best work.
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“We solve problems through design. We believe that instead of simply reacting to the crisis by adding policies and procedures and placing desks six feet apart, there is a real opportunity to redesign the space and foster long-term productivity and creativity through activity-based spaces,” said Veal. “We want to bring together health and safety with the psychology of cultural change.”
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Veal and Stucker, a married couple, bring decades of high-profile commercial and retail design experience, where they designed for the customer in mind, to respond to the immediate need for workplaces in transition. Now they apply this model to the modern workspace and design around the employee, the tasks they accomplish, and how they interact with their work environment to increase their productivity and ensure health and safety measures. DistanceDesigns’ proprietary model can be found in a detailed white paper on their website, DistanceDesigns.com.