Coronavirus: Design's Role for Businesses
Coronavirus: The role of design for businesses - Konbi® Blog article of February 29, 2020
By Konbi, February 29, 2020
How can Design Thinking help companies adapt to the rapid and unforeseen consequences of Coronavirus?
The Coronavirus epidemic is a sudden global event that requires rapid behavioral change at all levels of society. Because if the technological tools exist for the dissemination of information and the improvement of the working methods of the employees in this unforeseen context, the design solutions, when they exist, do not yet seem quite ready.
This is why the purpose of this article is to observe the effects that the global epidemic of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has on the functioning of society and businesses at this stage of its development and to examine to what extent point that could accelerate lasting movements of transformation already in progress, resulting from the Information Revolution entered its 3rd phase, Big Data.* This new cycle of the Information Revolution is done in parallel with the advent high-speed Internet, global social networks and ultra-doped smartphones.
What influence does Coronavirus have on the behavior of business leaders and consumers?
To try to answer this question through the prism of design, we will try to glimpse how design thinking combined with technology can help minimize the immediate negative effects of this global health crisis, in a context of sudden and potentially lasting reduction movements of goods and people.
Some of the direct consequences of Coronavirus are already manifested by the accelerating effect they play in terms of behavioral change, at the individual, economic, social and political level. It is certainly not the time to take stock and even less to attribute good or bad points depending on the way in which such an institutional actor behaves. The situation is unprecedented since the Spanish flu and affects the whole world almost simultaneously. Once past the pre-pandemic stage, during which it seemed so easy to point the finger at the possible responsibilities that China would have in Asia, Iran in the Middle East and Italy in Europe for not having been able to curb the Spread of the Coronavirus, it is hardly useful or productive now to enter into quarrels of responsibilities over a virus whose proven high contagiousness makes any policy of control and containment extremely difficult. Quickly and for an indefinite period, everyone at their level is now obliged to question their daily operating mode.
In the long term, it will be especially for public and health authorities to further improve their methods of prevention, control and treatment of a future virus of the same type, which Asia was a priori much better prepared for than the rest of the world after it was hit hard by SARS in 2003. This is why we will start by talking about the usefulness, current use and possible evolution of the surgical mask’s design in this unique context. Then we will tackle the question of the role of web communication tools and social networks whose effects participate as much in the rapid dissemination of useful and precious information as in the dissemination of rumors and mediocre remarks. Finally, a key topic in the business world (particularly the tertiary sector), which was for a long time the object of unreasonable distrust and which now stands out as one of the obvious solutions to the preservation of a good part of economic activity in 2020: teleworking.
Face Masks, useful or not?
The communication that has been made about respiratory protection masks does not stand out for its clarity. Despite the many official prevention messages, whether from political or health authorities, it is difficult today to understand whether masks have an effective preventive role other than reducing (or on the contrary accelerating) the anxiety-producing effects of the ongoing epidemic. It would seem that their only real benefit for a healthy subject would lie in what a surgical mask prevents from bringing his hands to the mouth or nose while he is wearing it, thereby reducing the risks of contamination. For a subject carrying the Coronavirus, it would reduce his capacity to be a vector of transmission of the virus for others.
"Cricklewood is ready" - Photograph by Steve Bowbrick, February 14, 2020, Great Britain (Source, Licence)
But what is especially striking is that from China to Hong Kong, via Japan, South Korea and Singapore, Asian countries have naturally adopted the wearing of a mask in their daily behavior and this from the end of January 2020, which is not the case elsewhere in the world, which it is true was then little affected, and even if the images coming from the zones currently in quarantine in Italy show there too that habits can change as fast as the epidemic progresses. Furthermore, in view of the current shortages of anti-projection masks which have the effect of greatly increasing their prices and causing the creation of a parallel black market on the Internet, the question of how to put on a mask, despite its importance is not topical at the moment for many people. In France, for example, the government says it has built up large stocks but reserves their use only for hospital staff.
On the question of the design of anti-projection masks intended for the use of the general public, and in the perspective of a future epidemic equivalent to COVID-19, it may be good for the manufacturers of sanitary masks to look into the question of the design of their product. Once the mask is removed from its packaging, no graphic or textual indication is present on the product itself, and nothing allows, in its current design and in its different variants, to understand the pose on the face. Whether it is on the way it should be hung or the direction in which it should be put, or even its period of validity, nothing is obvious. The blue color of the front and the white color of the back are not intuitive for anyone, except of course for healthcare professionals who compensate for the ergonomic defects in handling the product by regular use of it as part of their profession. Here we are typically in the presence of the case of a product initially thought for exclusively professional use (surgeons, operating room staff) and which suddenly becomes an object of mass consumption, even before having benefited from the expertise of teams of designers whose job is to facilitate the use of everyday products.
Concerning face masks, product designers and graphic designers, associated with the expertise of health professionals, will most certainly work in the coming months to create new prototypes of this respiratory protection mask, in anticipation of future situations equivalent to the current crisis.
Smoothing of exchanges thanks to the Internet
One of the positive indirect effects of the Coronavirus concerns the acceleration of web exchanges between scientists working on the sequencing, understanding and research of a vaccine for COVID-19. On this subject, we invite you to read the article in the journal Science: ‘A completely new culture of doing research.’ Coronavirus outbreak changes how scientists communicate.
Image with a scanning electron microscope of the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19, in orange on this photo), by NIAID , (Source, Licence)
Author's note: The improvement of medical imaging techniques, often combined with 3D printing, are also an important factor of progress for the scientific community, which has new tools that are always more efficient and quick for their work. of research.
Social networks, at the forefront of which Facebook and Twitter, of course play a very important amplifying role in the observation of the current crisis and the current evolution of behavior. They are one of the first sources of information for those who want to learn about the Coronavirus and participate in fact, both in the dissemination of useful messages of prevention and information as the most fanciful theories on the origins and consequences of COVID-19. Unfortunately, as long as social networks remain the main vector of information research for Internet users, the media will find it difficult, in an anarchic environment, to re-position themselves as the main sources of credible and verified information. The decision by Facebook, Twitter and others (in this case a conscious decision to lack design) not to seriously deal with the phenomenon of fake-news so as not to have to question their extremely profitable business model is not ready to move the situation in the right direction. It would be enough, far more than censoring at all costs or modifying the algorithms for posting posts according to pre-established degrees of credibility (which is always subject to interpretation), to implement design solutions clearly visible to the user, similar to the blue dot which identifies the official accounts of brands and celebrities, which would allow everyone to sort out what they want to continue to see on their wall or not.
The increase in information flows and their exploitation for commercial purposes, often without any transparency for the consumer and in the absence of any prior ethical reflection, participates in a global trend on the Internet which has no correlation with emergence of Coronavirus. However, it seems that COVID-19 is also accelerating the positive and negative effects of our ultra-connected and globalized lifestyle. China seems, in parallel to its relentless fight to stop the progression of the epidemic in Mainland China, to develop and test technological tools of control as elaborate as they carry in them the promise of a dystopian future where technology totally enslaved men, even making think that Blade Runner is a history movie rather than a SF movie.
Among these Chinese innovations which combine design and technology for the purpose of control and surveillance:
Use of drones to control quarantined areas and warn passers-by, using loudspeakers attached to them, not to stay on the street,
Addition of temperature detectors to police helmets,
Optimization of facial recognition AIs which can now identify people wearing surgical or other masks.
Telecommuting, the miracle solution for businesses?
"Working from home" - Photograph by Shannon McGee (Source, Licence)
If some employees dream about it since their first internship, others are wary of it for fear of finding themselves isolated from their colleagues and far from the decision-making centers of their company. Telecommuting is not at first sight a social binding factor for the company. However, given the evolution of the last thirty years, especially in SMEs and large companies, which tends to favor and reward individual achievement at the expense of collective effort, working from home seems to be a natural evolution which should already have made a consensus for the majority of companies, in particular in the tertiary sector and for executives.
But for that, it was necessary that a sufficiently powerful factor came to sweep away the main obstacle to the generalization of tele-work everywhere where open spaces dominate; the unfounded belief that an employee who is not permanently accessible by his hierarchy or his colleagues is necessarily less productive. While serious studies in recent years have finally called into question an internal organizational method which sometimes seems to be based more on surveillance and mutual distrust, particularly when the company is going through an internal crisis (drop in order book, drop in turnover business, managerial change, layoff plan), an exceptional health crisis was all that was needed to finally give telework the letters of nobility it deserves.
It is all the more astonishing to note that it was necessary to wait for the Coronavirus for this change in the corporate culture to take place, since the technological tools which make it possible to work efficiently from home exist for a long time and are already the lot daily life of all freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs who work at home for sometimes more than twenty years. Telephone and videoconference meetings are, in addition to e-mail, simple and inexpensive ways to continue to participate fully in the life of your business, without forgetting the time saved by saving daily travel time. Among the articles that discuss how companies are trying to limit downsizing by finding remote working solutions for their employees, you can read this article from the New York Times of February 26, 2020: 1,000 Workers, Go Home: Companies Act to Ward Off Coronavirus. To discover the consequences of the Coronavirus crisis on the Chinese job market which is experimenting with remote working on a large scale, we advise you to read this article from Inkstone of February 28, 2020: Bad mood, long hours, crying babies: China’s crash course on remote work.
* Big Data: or how the use of algorithms called AI (for Artificial Intelligence) associated with a large computing power make it possible to process a gigantic mass of information to extract from it (“learning”) the similarities and the differences, in order to be able to identify the link between a new information flow (text, image, video) received, the existing database and the interpretations that the programmer had previously attached to each expected signifier.