Designing For Resiliency

As we seek to build spaces that promote health and wellbeing, modular flooring will play an important role in promoting social distancing and safe collaboration within built environments.

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After months of social distancing, many people need and want to go back to work, which means buildings need to adjust—and quickly. While COVID-19 may be top-of-mind for designers right now, it’s important that our solutions aren’t too prescriptive—or else they risk looking dated within a few years.

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So how do we address the challenges of today—supporting physical and psychological wellbeing in the built environment—while also keeping an eye on the future? We discuss this important design challenge and how flexibility and adaptability are keys to successfully moving forward in our blog post, Designing for Resiliency:

“…nothing is permanent. Which means that any of-the-moment design solutions within spaces have to be easy, quick, and low-cost. Flexible design strategies could take advantage of modular flooring to make active changes; for example, selectively replacing tiles to facilitate physical distancing or to direct movement. In a phased approach to opening back up, flexibility requires addressing safety alongside functionality.

Acknowledging that flexibility is necessary in the short-term, the impact of COVID-19 will require more than that. The changes that we’ll see in terms of design may not emerge for some time and, in many cases, will be unpredictable. Because of this, adaptability will become more important for buildings and the spaces within them.

Adaptability requires the capacity to accommodate substantial change over the lifetime of a building in response to its social, economic, and physical surroundings. Adaptability also responds to the ever-changing needs of building occupants.

In this way, designing adaptable spaces is an exercise that considers the present and the future. Much like nature, spatial design doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be able to change based on new information, i.e. what’s going on in the world and how that affects the people using the space. Staying attuned to these internal and external factors is what adaptability is all about.”

As we seek to build spaces that promote health and wellbeing, modular flooring will play an important role in promoting social distancing and safe collaboration within built environments. To discover all the ways you can leverage modular flooring when designing for resiliency, read the rest of our blog post.

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