VIRTUAL PLANNING 2021 AND BEYOND Ken Hutchens, Chief Creative Officer Cody Jones, Creative Manager As the effects of COVID-19 and its impact on daily life and business operations began to emerge, VLK, like all businesses, quickly pivoted from an office environment to a work from home solution. Our firm has navigated major disruptions before. Our Houston office had previously experienced major disruptions due to the flooding from Hurricane Harvey (2017) and the Tax Day Flood (2016). As this new reality set in, we were challenged to determine how we would continue to successfully engage our clients and their communities in this all-remote environment. The pressing needs of our clients, however, did not change. Projects had to continue to move forward as scheduled with the design of new facilities for their communities. It was also imperative that their communities remain involved in the design of these new campuses, even during a global pandemic forcing almost everyone to adapt to a new and unfamiliar way of life. This new normal effectively halted public events and group gatherings. In place
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of coming together in-person, people relied on video conference calls as they sheltered-inplace, wore masks outside of their homes and adhered to social distancing. As the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic began to transform everyone’s way of life, we took our first steps to design a new approach to facilitating meaningful public engagement using online platforms and new protocols for conducting meetings that wouldn’t hinder our ability to connect with our clients and their stakeholders.
We knew that we needed to develop a community engagement process that would be highly interactive, that stakeholders would still find meaningful in a remote context, and that could even improve on our conventional engagement approach.
