Journal 03: on working from home and homeschooling

Welcome to Design Council’s weekly journal. This week we’ve learnt how to work from home and home-school simultaneously as well as be agile and flexible in an entirely new way.

Everything changes and nothing stands still - Heraclitus

Anstey Burnett, Senior Communications Manager on The Body Coach

Working at home with children on the loose is a challenge, though less for me than for others. My husband, usually an events photographer but now out of work for the foreseeable future, is now headteacher in our household. We have two active boys aged 9 and 11. Their school day starts with the 9 am live workout with Joe Wicks, who recently declared he’d be the nation’s P.E. teacher during the pandemic.

For half an hour, we all join around 750,000 other individuals and families across the globe, from toddlers to the elderly, for high-intensity cardio and strength exercises. For 30 minutes we bounce around, throw ourselves on the floor and leap about pretending to be kangaroos, rabbits and Spiderman (all optional!) or — in the case of my husband — The Body Coach himself (minus the hair). We finish the session energised and ready to settle down to work.

Exercise is fantastic for our physical and our mental health. During this extraordinary time, we must do all we can to boost our mood, reduce our stress and keep active. Whether you have children or not, I wholeheartedly recommend Joe’s live sessions. If you’re not on a 9 am conference call, head to YouTube and give it a go. You never know, you might just fall in love with this pre-work workout.

Deborah Kellard, Head of Marketing on the new normal

Four weeks ago, I posted on LinkedIn about my first campaign when I joined Design Council in 2017 and how we were celebrating that week with our Showcase. It’s hard to process how quickly the world has changed and that working remotely (for some) is the new norm. I read today that perfect is the new boring and kindness is the new cool — how true that feels. At Design Council we’re learning to be agile, flexible and define engagement in an entirely new way. Great effort, resourcefulness, determination, and collaboration with colleagues and clients is helping us navigate through this new way of working. How quickly in literally hours we’re using new tools in addition to Teams such as Zoom, Miro and even the Houseparty app.

We’re an organisation that believes design can be used as a force for change. We’ve started to quickly adapt and be responsive by convening digital round tables with our network of experts to look at how design can respond to the needs of the most vulnerable; setting up virtual workshops and design reviews; curating the best examples of excellent design through our blog; a weekly journal on how we’re connecting with ourselves and our clients and we’re exploring collaborations with other organisations to share digital content. There’s a lot more to do, but if the examples of great design, innovation and collaboration are anything to go by, then at least something positive is coming out of this pandemic.

The views and opinions expressed in this journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of Design Council.

This entry was originally published on our journal on Medium.