The Futures of Work

A Future Map.
An organized scheme of Possible Futures, highlighting the relations and influences around the topic of work.

Year

2017

In collaboration with

ISIA Firenze

With the technological support of

HER – Human Ecosystems Relazioni

Education
Research & Consultancy
Transmedia

The Futures of Work is a project on how the world of work is changing, showcased in the form of an elaborate Design Fiction. It is the output of the Transmedia Design course held by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico at ISIA Firenze, where Nefula had a tutoring role for the entire duration of the semester.
The project is compose by 6 different concepts, that takes the form of interactive objects and fakes tv shows videos.
Nefula designed a Future Map that shows and highlight the correlations between all the different concepts, giving the possibility to had an overview on the Possible Futures of work.

The Future Map designed by Nefula

The research started from a large scale data harvesting process, performed by our partner HER and accompanied by a qualitative research performed by students through books, articles, projects, videos, movies. Following the Near Future Design methodology, the final output of the research phase consists in a series of visualizations highlighting the CURI (Curious Rituals), the State of the Arts and Technologies and the most relevant evolutive tensions in the domain of “work“, to describe the Strange Now.

As a results of this process we found 6 different areas on which “work” could be questioned in the near future.

Man-Machine replaceability
What if you could be replaced by robots?

Free time and 24/7 work 
How does free time transform in the rising 24/7 culture?

Social rank dictatorship
How does computationally calculated social ranking influence work, careers and professional relationship?

Data driven Careers 
What happens when your boss is an algorithm?

AI-Human competition
What are the skills that allow people to become competitive with an AI?

Replaceable human commodities 
What happens when platforms transform human beings into replaceable commodities?

Download Future Map

Some details from the Future Map

The project, including the Future Map and all the Pre-totypes has been shown during the NET FUTURES exhibition in Brussels on June 28th and 29th 2017. NET FUTURES is an important annual event around the future of Internet, co-organized by the European Commission. We have been there, hosted by the STARTS – Science, Technology, and the ARTS pavilion curated by Martine-Nicole Rojina.