About Prem Chandavarkar, Managing Partner, CnT Architects:
CnT Architects is a legacy practice based in Bengaluru, with a history stretching back over six decades to being the city’s first architectural firm. Prem Chandavarkar does not act as the primary designer of the firm – as they have five autonomous teams, each of whom are encouraged to express their independent voices. His primary role is to: (a) Mentor the process that defines the philosophy and values of the firm, articulate them and hold them high; (b) Review designs and projects to act as a second line of defence that ensures they resonate with the philosophy and values of the firm; and (c) Mentor senior personnel in their personal development.
Academy of Excellence for Advancement of Manufacturing Technology
How is the firm balancing its operations, employee safety and efficiency?
I would separate this issue into ‘hygiene’ and ‘health’ factors. The hygiene factors are tangible, relatively straightforward, and often standardised. The goals of most of them can be defined in standards, codes and policy documents, and one can adopt a checklist-based approach to ensure they are effectively managed. Hygiene factors are based on minimum thresholds of acceptability and tend to soon run up against limitations of diminishing returns on effort expended.
Health factors are more intangible and recognising and working with them requires both empathy and vision. Health factors have more of an impact on final results, as they aspire toward excellence rather than minimum standards. Understanding them requires active thinking and research, rather than a reliance on documented codes and protocols. They require long term vision, so a measure of a firm’s efficiency is seen in terms of final results and strategic difference rather than short-term factors that are more visible, such as the quantum of time people spend at their desks.
As Tim Brown said, There is a difference between ‘doing design’ and ‘thinking design’. Doing design is about the visual refinement of the designed object. Thinking design is about using design to add value to the world and requires a critical attitude that never accepts the status quo unquestionably, always looking for ways to expand its boundaries. Unfortunately, most workplace design stays mired in the realm of doing design.
How has the pandemic impacted workplaces and its functions as we’ve typically known it?
We are still to figure out the full impact of the low-touch economy, as it calls for a radical restructuring of the way we manage enterprises. We are used to a world where daily supervision was easily possible, and this allowed for an atomisation of work into tasks that were regularly checked. Now that this is no longer possible in a low-touch economy, organisations have to shift from a task-based culture to an entrepreneurial culture. Workers, starting from the bottom up, have to be empowered to think, create and work on their own, and management becomes more about the weaving of results within a context of defined vision rather than the definition and monitoring of tasks.
Most organisations have not made this shift in thinking as yet, hoping that the pandemic will end soon and we can go back to the world that preceded it. This is not going to happen. Firstly, with new mutations appearing rapidly, a significant anti-vaxxer movement, and poor implementation of vaccinations in most parts of the world, it is likely the pandemic will not come to a sudden halt but will gradually taper down over a period of a few years. Secondly, workers have got a taste for remote work and its benefits of avoiding the stress of daily commutes, the ability to stay close to family, the relative flexibility of schedules, and so on. They are unlikely to be willing to give up such benefits. So even after the pandemic ends we will most likely be looking at hybrid models that combine remote work and in-office activity.
This requires a mindset change, along with the supporting infrastructure of training and tools that is needed for the new paradigm. Management has to rethink its role, especially middle management which till now had been content with acting as a communications bridge between top management and working staff. We are yet to see the mainstreaming of the new patterns that need to emerge.
Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories- Corporate Office
Given the accelerated pace of transformation, what emerging technologies is the industry working with?
We initially saw a mushrooming of meeting technologies like Zoom and messaging technologies like Slack. These were largely existing tools that have been refined to meet new demands. But there are now new needs which technology is yet to address. How do we make collective work visible so that you can contextualise what you are doing remotely? How do we make organisational culture visible to facilitate the formation of communities of practice within which new hires are quickly mainstreamed? What are the tools that will allow serendipitous interaction from remote locations? We are yet to see technologies emerge that will address such questions. But as the demand around these questions get articulated in response to the changing circumstances, I am sure we will see new technology tools emerge.
How are companies working towards balancing sustainability with safety in the post-pandemic era?
There was so much to handle that the initial thought was that we need to prioritise, and focus shifted to the pandemic, and sustainability did take a back seat. But we have seen in the last few months a cluster of extreme weather events, some of which have had large scale impacts such as wildfires of a scale that the smoke cloud travels a few thousand kilometres. It is evident that we cannot afford to put them in a sequence and have to learn to handle sustainability and the pandemic simultaneously.
Interestingly, both require a similar change of mindset – a change from rational conceptual models to more fluid strategies that embrace complexity, emergence, and network logic.Triveni Turbines Factory Campus
How is workplace design transforming?
It is not a change of a few elements – the entire workplace needs to change. Think of the word ‘workplace’ itself – derived from ‘place where you work.’ This meant that individual work was foregrounded, and the landscape of the office is dominated by open workstations for staff and
work cabins for senior personnel. Anything else is support infrastructure to this foreground. Support spaces for formal interaction are designed in the form of conference and discussion rooms. Spaces for informal interaction are rarely designed and are expected to somehow fit into spaces designed for other purposes – corridors, water coolers, cafeterias, or standing next to a colleague’s desk.
Otis Elevator Test Tower & Factory
Now, the place you work and the place where you interact are not necessarily co-located within the same building, maybe not even the same city. So the visual foreground of the office will radically change. The office may change to an interaction space where you collaborate or exchange thoughts in short spurts at periodic intervals, and not a space you spend with your colleagues over all your working hours. So the visual landscape of the office will reverse its earlier order – interaction is in the foreground, and spaces where you can sit and work (perhaps in a hot desking mode) are support spaces. The office may wind up looking more like a social club than what we are traditionally used to visualising.