Between 1–31 March 2022, Studio Dojo conducted an experiment to understand how people imagine the future of their work.
Enter to explore what we uncovered.
This person is alone, sitting on a chair. Content displayed on screens float through the air all around her. She doesn't move, but the data being displayed changes along with her thoughts. She hears other voices in her head. They are other people interacting with her thoughts, which are automatically categorised and summarised as the exchange of thought continues.
Someone always has to be around to manage software manifestations. Even if it was cursory and most software development work is done by Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.
This person is sitting on a bench in what looks like a well put together park. Floating in front of her is a small screen with a face on it. They are talking about their work. She is able to quickly enter notes about this person by simply glancing to the left of the screen. The words in her mind appear as she thinks through what the person on the screen is telling her. After a quick goodbye, she flicks her hand up and the screen disappears. She gets up from the bench and with a touch of a button, her sunglasses turn a shade darker. She speaks a name out loud and another call is made.
Most of the work that is done at this point is automated. There are very few humans that work and those that do work need constant learning to ensure they can keep up. She is there to ensure those few humans have what they need. Mental health is a key objective in her line of work. She studies each employee’s mental health regularly by checking in on them. She also works with people managers to ensure schedules are maintained and that new laws and regulations supporting employees are adhered to.
This person is trying hard to secure the resources they need to support compassionate “grey areas” of citizens' needs. Even as resources are increasingly scarce, there is a pressing and urgent need to triage and prioritise where governments invest, and the rules and policies that govern the distribution of these resources.
With a range of daily problems, requests and complaints streaming into the government every day, somebody has to make sense of how to group, prioritise and tackle these problems. Every team within the government has its own limited resources and constraints. There is a need to co-opt the attention and interest of these other teams with the promise of a good outcome.
Good outcomes are defined by their ability to contribute to measurable citizen satisfaction, and to positive affect towards civic services. A range of guerilla Robin Hood-style community organisations have sprung up, with the nimbleness to speedily tackle problems and break the rules to make quick fixes. One of your personal beliefs is that their engagement is vital to helping to solve some of the issues that are coming up. You’re keen to understand how these partnerships might happen, and open to doing so quietly and experimentally.
Another pattern that is providing hope is increased ability for frugal innovation and ground-up efforts at scrounging and recycling existing resources. You wonder if there is a way to open-source some of the existing “dead systems” and abandoned code that exists within the government, so that independents can make use of this “waste” infrastructure.
After the proliferation of data and wealth in the 2000s, the earth hit a point of resource famine. Since then, there is increased scarcity among resources, and governments have had to prioritise their interventions.
Increased civic discontentment has resulted in a need for agents who can broker deals with self-organised groups of citizens who are agitating for change and different priorities.
There is a need for a coordinator to align their allegiances to that of the government, by ensuring that resources are shared and allocated in a meaningful way.
This restores the sense of connectedness and possibility within an otherwise fraught society.
This person is looking through cases and preparing for big meetings between different stakeholders that aims to maintain harmony. The principles of equity and equality are being applied to the meeting and will form the structure of the outcomes of the meeting.
Society has finally accepted that they need to consider the perspectives and expetise of others. Society engages with the mindset that everyone is of equal standing, and that everyone here will benefit by working with each other, rather than inequality. To reach truly holistic solutions that are formulated on the basis of equality and equity however, there is a need for facilitators to help coordinate such meetings and usher the complex group of unique individuals into a common goal.
This person is working on a creative research project. For inspiration, he is working out of a little remote cabin located somewhere in a protected part of the woods. He remains connected to other people and the rest of world with the help of technology.
Sources of food and fresh produce have become very limited due to the change in climate, naturally reducing the number of tastes/flavours/smells that exists. On top of being a form of sustenance, food is still a huge vehicle for reflecting culture and transcending emotions. As such, there is a need to research ways to preserve or elevate flavour and taste experiences.
Co-facilitator with AI counterparts in highly personalized learning journeys for global citizens.
Symbiotic integration of humans and computers where learning is not anymore about learning lexical knowledge, but guiding empathetic futures.
She is sifting through and reviewing relevant user data flagged by their AI system, and fine tuning/implementing the recommendations made by the AI system to nudge their user's behaviour in their desired direction.
To escape a doomsday scenario, humanity needs to collectively move in the same direction so that we can effectively cut down emissions, avoid social conflict and move collectively towards solving pressing social problems. Government agencies are making use of design and an understanding of human behavioural psychology to nudge behaviours through the services that they provide (of course this also means that companies can use this to their own advantage).
I am working on a network that governs the city I live in, in which the government uses crowdsourced data to enact decisions. But these decisions are a collective agreement from all who live in the city, collected through a new technology that allows them to all participate.
People are more outspoken about how they want to be governed, and there is demand for more citizen participation. Travel is more fluid. With big group data, one can identify various groups they would feel more attuned to. People naturally herd together with like minded folk.
This person is travelling to another part of the world where people do not have access to clean water, food and clean air. The disparity between this countries’ economic status and its neighbours has led to its civilians bearing the forefront of such effects. This person and her company are trying to help the people of this part of the world. But not through volunteering like they do in humanitarian aid, but more of finding an effective solution that could tide them through such tough times.
The disparity in the world has become worse than it is now. And humans realise that it takes everyone’s effort to make this world liveable again and everyone is now playing a part. Funding is given by the big players that has gotten ahead in the race. They realise they need everyone in order to maintain their hold of the top positions.
This person is in a sterile environment with only 2 or 3 others around. The clients he's working with are disabled but very capable. It makes me wonder what has happened to persons with disabilities who are not as capable or lower-functioning.
Everyone is judged in terms of their level of contribution to society & the economy. Those who aren't able to keep up or pull their weight are not welcome in such a world. It's a tough but necessary and calculated reality. As such, some others are required to oversee operational aspects to ensure productivity and efficiency.
I’m leveraging on voice activated commands to run some of the work, and working with a virtual personal buddy. It is like my mobile phone but instead of a physical device, it will be virtually connected to me.
I’m doing work on sustainability in disaster recovery and management. Sea level rise results in natural disaster happening more regularly and instead of mitigating, my role is in assimilating people and supporting them when disaster happens. This does not mean that the world is in complete catastrophe but more like when more frequent localised disasters happen.
Rise in sea levels result in natural disasters happening more regularly. Instead of mitigating, my role is in assimilating people and supporting them when disaster happens. This does not mean that the world is in complete catastrophe but more like when more frequent localised disasters happen.
Hired by multiple tech companies to build and retain their community of users. Likely mode of engagement is through VR/AR/metaverse platforms.
People, organisations, and communities are fragmented/dispersed because of the increasing amounts of time that the world is spending on tech platforms, and this job exists to re-connect them.
Work is fun and engaging.
Mundane, labour intensive work and bullshit jobs are redundant. People are universally given a living allowance on the basis of their age and needs, which liberates them to engage in whatever meaningful activities that inspire and motivate them. They can choose to immerse themselves in their chosen vocation or to spend their time in leisure. The demand for meaningful and engaging leisure activities peaks. The corresponding demand for leisure crafters similarly peaks; their vocation is to design meaningful and engaging activities for leisure.
He’s starting up his devices to read the news of the day - every article is being processed through powerful filters that immediately let him know what’s true and what’s false. Grey area articles - he does a quick scan that lets him track in quick time where the data is sourced from and who is behind it.
It’s a real pain point what is true and what is false. It leads to crippling bad decision making and corporates and institutions are willing to pay top consultants to stage reality interventions. Kind of like the movie Inception but not dreams.
Over 270 participants experienced a futures thinking process through an interactive story narrated by a chat bot.
Created using participatory methods, we explored two questions;
These four images are based on the popular four futures model by one of the most notable figures in the futures thinking field, Jim Dator, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies.
In his model, Dator observes that social change narratives can typically be classified into these four recurring groups of images, stories, or policies regarding the impact of that particular change.
Whether it is an individual planning their career, or a group of C-suite executives deciding on business strategy, our images of the future influence our choices in the present.
There are multiple reasons why someone would choose one archetype. We wondered what information we can uncover if we helped individuals examine why they imagined the future the way they do?
So we asked them…
In futures or foresight practice, this is called horizon scanning, or environmental scanning.
The act of horizon scanning is to deliberately collect and make sense of signals of change we think are important to consider when planning for the future.
Some of them have historical data to support their existence and potential trajectories of influence, while some have little to no historical data and may seem more like small one-off events.
