Between a technological utopian vision of enhanced future lives, reality of longer life spans and imposing environmental risks, how do we continue evolving new frameworks around ‘work’ in the future?
In the project context section I show how I projected my three protagonists into the future and began to invent new jobs for them. The process of speculation was grounded in research and foresights, but was also very organic and stimulating.
In order to visualise new ways of working and the possible products and services that might emerge from these newly invented jobs, I needed to have a social and a spatial context to contain them. Hence came the idea of creating a fictional block in the city of the future, which I called Little Brinkland.
The invention of this fictional architectural space gave me an opportunity and the flexibility to create various workspaces and play with the messiness of the transforming urban environment. I was able to visualise jobs, services, products, and ways people would move by creating urban scenarios and placing the jobs in the context of a 'real' yet imaginary city.
After creating Little Brinkland, I needed to find a way of presenting design concepts while providing a glimpse of a social change in a believable and tangible manner. Over and above everything else, I was very keen to present a human story, about the lives of the three people and how their ways of working evolved in few years.
In order to do so, I take on the role of a chronicler in Little Brinkland and my job was to visit people, talk to them and write the stories of their everyday lives. This role allowed me to gather insights into the ways of living and working that my protagonists have adopted in Little Brinkland. I could then create props and scenarios which would show my design ideas already in use with apparent ‘feedback’ from users.
