The product design and manufacturing company Colebrook Bosson Saunders collaborated with the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the the Royal College of Art to investigate the future of work and the workplace. As an interaction designer hired for the job - this became my brief - one of the most challenging I have ever worked on.
We all know how we work today – most of us in offices in one fixed location for a set number of hours a day. But how will we work in the future – the surprisingly near future perhaps – when emerging technologies rethink the rhythyms of working life against a backdrop of a rapidly ageing workforce and growing environmental fears? While exploring these key drivers of change that are likely to affect the way we work in the near future, I also carried out primary research to get a better understanding of our curent workscapes.
Based on interviews and 'flickr dialogues' with people who posted images of their workplaces and obsessions online, I
created scenarios of three people who became the protagonists of the project.
Alice, the first protagonist, is young woman who works from home. She is a cyber junkie, data neurotic person for whom the boundaries between love, work, food, sleep and life have blurred as she spends about 15-17 hours working and living inside her screen...
Elizabeth, the third protagonist, is an anxious office worker, a librarian on the verge of retirement and eager to discover new work opportunities and learn new skills.
Based on research around new and emerging technologies and impact of demographics and environmental risks on our future lives, and being informed by insights from futurists, I projected my three protagonists into the future and began to invent new jobs for them. The above image is the future jobscape of Alice, based on her current skills and the areas she could start working in. The same exercise was done with the other two people also.
I began to sketch and illustrate some of these jobs and tried to create the high street of the future where different occupations merge and strange new ones spring up... For instance the pet surgery merges with the electronics shop....
Some of the other jobs and services I visualised included the 'digital weather man', the 'tree radio' service, the new 'mobile office systems' which may be operating post peak-oil and so on... These are not to be seen as concepts, but as sketches which are speculative while keeping the ideas based in ground reality rather then pure science fiction.
