Workshop culture

The 2020/21 virus pandemic put severe restrictions on face-to-face interaction in the workplace, not least in the physical design studio. As a result, many in-person activities and engagements shifted to remote working modes, that is, working from home, or online. Post-pandemic, then, will studio culture return to its former modus operandi of mixed, or hybrid mode - analogue and digital? Signs are that the upward digital studio trend will continue. If so, what happens to a studio-based design tradition, or culture that even before the pandemic was increasingly mediated by the computer or overshadowed by digital and social media? What happens to design ideation when influenced, if not relying on the abstractness of mass-media sources rather than the hands-on concreteness of the studio? Or, what happens to the effort of first-hand experience with a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world when computing, from CAD to AI fills the gap between imagination and reality?  If so, what might we lose in the process, and does it matter?