Moving Forward from the Discomfort of our Own Home
How a Family of Six can Learn to Stay out of Each Other’s Way During COVID Times
COVID-19 has affected the lives of virtually every single human being in this world. For some, the impacts have been minimal, and many have found ways to adjust their lives by now and figured out how to manage work, family, and personal obligations in a way that is sustainable and, in some cases, even more effective than before. My family and I have made a lot of progress toward finding ways to manage our new situation while minimizing the disruption to our priorities and responsibilities, however, when it comes to being able to focus on work at home and feeling comfortable, we still have a lot to learn. This is why I am now turning to Design Thinking to help me come up with a better strategy to efficiently manage work and family from the (dis)comfort of our own home.
A Little Bit of History
First, let’s empathize with our situation a little by taking a look at how things were like before March 2020. On a full-time basis, our family consisted of my husband (Brett), myself, my son (Adrian), and our German Wirehaired Pointer pup (Rizzo). Brett’s three kids (Emerson, Kai, and Dixon) would spend most weekends with us on a part-time basis. This certainly is a big crowd, but it used to be manageable as everyone would have their hobbies and activities outside of the home, and having everyone at the house at the same time during the day was a rare thing. My husband and I both work for the same Software company, and we would spend a lot of time at the office or traveling or driving the kids around to and from their activities or going for outdoor runs and the amount of time we actually spent at home was minimal.
We moved into our current home in 2016 when our priorities were completely different. At the time, having a dedicated office space was probably at the bottom of the priority list, if it even made the list at all. We didn’t want a big house because we didn’t spend a lot of time in it, and I guess more house meant more cleaning which meant less free time to do fun things. We settled for the typical suburban two-story, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home, with open family areas on each level.
There are three rooms at the top level which include the master bedroom, Emerson’s bedroom, and the other one is shared by Kai and Dixon. Adrian gets the basement bedroom and bathroom all to himself. And just like that, all rooms are taken, and all we have left are the open bonus room front and center at the top level, living room in the main floor and the big entertainment/games area in the basement, which is where the boys spend most of their time playing video games or foosball when they’re home. This worked well for our lifestyle and although having everyone at home at the same time could make the place feel a bit tight, this wasn’t an everyday thing, so it was alright.
The New Normal
Fast forward to today and things are nothing like what we could have predicted back then. My husband and I both work from home full-time now and what began as something temporary that would potentially end in mid-June initially, then end of September after reassessing, has now been deemed a permanent arrangement. In addition, the three younger kids who would spend the weekends with us are now around during the week and way more often than before. It is great having everyone around but we are starting to feel like the walls might be closing in on us.
Because working from home wasn’t something we did often, we never bothered to designate an area of the house as a working space. For the first two weeks of working from home, we set up our equipment on our dining room table. After a few days of back and neck pain caused by dining chairs that were not designed to be sat on for 9+ hours per day, we decided to buy a couple of desks and ergonomic chairs online and after rearranging some furniture and giving some things away we were able to create enough space to repurpose our top-level bonus room to become our new shared home office and our problem was solved, right? Not exactly.
Defining the Problem
Thinking about what wasn’t working for us was a very easy task, we all had something to say about what has become an inconvenience, distraction, nuisance, or even what wasn’t really broken but would still like to fix. We used a Design Thinking approach to determine what the real issues were, starting with high-level concerns, why this is important for us, who it is affecting, and how our quality of life is being impacted. To achieve this we decided to use the Problem Definition template from DIY Toolkit.
As shown on the above screenshot of the Problem Definition Mural board, everyone had different pain points and concerns for how our working from home arrangement was impacting either productivity or comfort. All kids agreed that they didn’t like to be caught on camera when walking by, Adrian was particularly frustrated because a couple of times he has been asked to stay off the Internet to avoid bandwidth issues during important presentations, and for the adults, not being able to focus with all the background noise was the most significant pain point.
Our problem in one sentence: Make working from home an enjoyable experience for all family members when everyone is home and the office area is an open space.
How Might We…
Asking ourselves ‘How Might We’ to the above problem statement kick started all sorts of conversations. Questions like ‘How might we get everyone out of the house during the day?’ to ‘How might we just move to a new house?’ were evidence that we were too focused on trying to get to the solution instead of better understanding our problem. Although it somewhat defeated the purpose of the exercise one thing was very clear, we were not comfortable and this was not acceptable. Other questions were posed that gave us additional hints as to how we should be thinking about our issue in a way that will lead to productive brainstorming to determine the best possible outcome for all members of the family. These helped us articulate a final ‘How Might We’ statement that satisfactorily covered everyone’s needs and expectations.
How might we redesign our current shared home office space to make it more quiet and private so that we can be more comfortable and focused?
Now Let the Brainstorming Begin
Understanding everyone’s concerns helped us realize that what we thought was a focus problem while working from home for me and my husband, was actually a family problem about being comfortable with our new arrangement. It is affecting everyone in a slightly different way so we have to ensure that our solution or solutions, take into account the opinions of every member of the family. We took a stab at sharing some initial ideas and adding them to a Mural board to get started and since we were feeling inspired. This will most likely be a work in progress for the next couple of weeks but I still wanted to share our first draft of our Prioritization exercise and I will look forward to seeing what else we can come up with!
References
Asei-Dantoni, S., Meas, L., Vasudevan, D., & Aylin. (2016, December 01). Problem Definition. Retrieved June 13, 2020, from https://diytoolkit.org/tools/problem-definition-2/
How Might We. (n.d.). Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.designkit.org/methods/3
DIY Toolkit: Problem Definition. (2014). Retrieved June 13, 2020, from https://vimeo.com/91934378
