Imagined futures 7: Work

Image from Gamma Keystone/France

The image on this page is from a 1969 exhibition in Hanover, Germany. It's a simulation of how the photographer imagined working in an office would look like in the year 2000. The size of the monitors on the console reflects the technology of the time, which was bulky and heavy, reliant on cathode ray tubes. Today's screens are slim and lightweight, due to rapid the development digital technology and relentless miniaturisation of components in recent years.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this image of future work is that the office worker is tethered to a specific location within a work space. Whilst office work is far from obsolete, and many people still spend much of their working day tethered to desks gazing at computer screens, the trend is now very much toward mobile, any time, any place working. Boundaries are blurring between what we consider work and what is allocated as leisure (this can of course be both a threat and an opportunity). Devices today are small and portable (I'm typing this text on my MacBook Air which weighs less than 1.4 kilograms). Many people conduct their entire business days using little more than a smartphone, often while on the move.

As I look at this image, I can't help but notice the cumbersome design of the console and the  psychology behind it. I wonder how the office worker feels about being confined, as if she were navigating a starship or piloting an airliner. Is there a sense of claustrophobia? Does she long to get out and spend time in the open somewhere? The keyboard unit(s) also appear to be less than intuitive, and wonder about how long it would take to train someone to be proficient. Today's interfaces are far more intuitive, often touchscreen designs, and in the future they may be voice or gesture controlled. Siri, Cortana, Alexa and other intelligent personal assistant tools are already widely deployed on smartphones, laptops and room based systems in home and office. The rapid development of user interfaces is changing the face of work dramatically, and as we become more dependent on these tools, so our conception of what it means to 'go to work' will also need to be reimagined.

Previous posts in this series:
1: Telecommunications
2: Classrooms
3: Music
4: Enhanced vision
5: Robot teachers?
6: Home learning


Imagined futures 7: Work by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.