Collisions in a Digital Shift

Collisions generally invoke bad emotions. Car collisions, atomic collisions or celestial collisions. But, what if we though of human interactions as collisions? One of the great side effects of a city is the daily interactions between people; face to face, in person, touching, shaking hands, laughing interactions. Many of these are expected scenes in our daily routine and bring us great joy and stability, while adding great richness to our lives. We are, after all, social animals and we yearn for human touch and intimacy. Equally important are the random interactions with people as we bump and meander throughout our daily walk to work or run down to the coffee stand on a break. How many serendipitous meetings, true love encounters, and neighborly interactions are not taking place as we increasingly shift to a remote model? Two people literally colliding was the premise of a great number of 90s romcom's love interest origin story.

Now, think of the business impact of moving to virtual interactions. When you meet someone in person, you take in their entire gestalt and subconsciously imply characteristics such as intelligence, attraction, trustworthiness and kindness in an instant. How does this work in a two-dimensional world of torsos on a screen? These in-person "collisions", as Harvard Professor of Economics Edward Glaeser calls them, are crucial to fostering relationships, ideas and innovation. Creating clusters where the likelihood of smart, creative and entrepreneurial people might collide with others like them, has influenced the design of workplaces, hotel lobbies, college campuses and even entire cities. Will innovation begin to decline as the rise of the remote workforce increases?