Unit- 2 Future of Work

Future of Work- wk.4

In week 4, we were preparing for our incubator session and had previously started with our website and video for conveying our narrative, but the challenge we faced here was that the setup for the incubator had to convey the message on its own and thus it was a little challenging to design a setup which did this since a lot of factors about feasibility and information consumption as well as user experience goes into it.

Firstly, we wanted the video generated to be viewed by the audience and hence we procured an LCD screen to accommodate this, but the website is a tool to collect feedback and hence, we also got a tablet to set up the website, but what if people do not engage with these? How are we going to convey our statistics and data? How are we portraying our future workspaces, how are we showing our narrative, so for this, we came up with the idea of having a long-running poster that conveyed our narrative to people who read and interact with tangible things rather than something intangible? We also analysed everyone’s skillset in doing tasks that are required in setting up the incubator, and doing the research for the poster proved to be my set of skills, and I was leaning towards more statistical data and graphs since that’s easier to represent and understand, rather than text. While reading through different journals from around the world, I noticed that a lot of countries focused on being prepared for automation which is speculated to happen (Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, IMF, 2024), this talks about the rising income and wealth inequality in developing economies and also the preparedness of these economies and the global economy in general to accommodate this automation and replacement.

In another report by McKinsey, which microspocially looks at various industries and different skillsets, it contains based on various parameters and how likely they are to be automated, and what are the different factors that are going to affect this automation. In the graph in E6, it shows the theoretical prediction for automation, with the various factors affecting, and it also shows the prediction with the consideration of various, technological, socio-economic factors affecting it, and it is quite likely that 2060-2065, we will be completely automated as well as adapted to this automation. (A FUTURE THAT WORKS: AUTOMATION, EMPLOYMENT, AND PRODUCTIVITY, JANUARY 2017)

Now all this evidence shows that our approach to 2046, is quite realistic enough where a waitress is replaced, as well as a chef who is going to be replaced very soon, and also a standard tech employee is replaced, but there’s only a designer who is developing the technology, I think the narrative is quite ironic and makes me think about how we have developed as a civilisation and how this development is affecting us, this also led us to questions about it affecting interpersonal relationships and how they are going to be affected, so in our narrative, we talk about how happy organisation is all about humans, and no machines, which is also owned by the same CEO of the tech company, X in our narrative fiction and this leads to another point as was referred to by Rishabh in our interview, in wk.1, which talks about biological-social-technological evolution, which I think was one of the main things we could not get across during our incubator.

I did see people engaging with our narrative and speculation and they did not question the narrative, but rather they had questions related to the narrative, even though our website analytics show negative responses and comments about happy organisations, it is still proof of engagement and that there is scope to further the narrative and speculation and work on it.

In a workshop on Wednesday, about technology as a bodily extension, it showed me a perspective on how various technologies have subconsciously been used to potray ourselves, our thoughts and ideas, and that the incubator where we used technologies is an example of that and at this day and age, it is our tool to express ourselves, but what if, one day it is not? a place where it may be at par with us, or maybe worse, excel us? Another thing we realised is we might have to streamline our narrative a bit more than it is, and refine it to convey our speculation better and also back it up with research.

We plan to incorporate the feedback from our peers and tutors into our final presentation and improve on it, so that it can have the impact we are aiming for, and achieve it.

Future of Work- wk.3

So, in this week, i think we progressed more to the “doing” part of our project than the research part, we presented our collaborated research and tried to reach out to stakeholders(tech employees, and hospitality workers in the same companies). One interesting point came up about how to reach out to people, what grabs one’s attention, and why it is more effective than other methods of communication and reaching out to stakeholders.
I think I realised there are two types of communication:

Active: when we actively try and communicate and collect from the stakeholders, like interviews, comments/feedback, questionnaire responses etc.
Passive: when we collect data from underlying contexts, like engagement, change in behaviour, perception etc.

We also learned about how important it is to answer, ‘Why them’, in our reaching out and be specific with the sample of the project and how it is going to affect the data in-turn, a good way to develop this was through developing something interactive and immersive since no one’s going to be interested in just reading a bunch of data and research articles, in a random work-a-day mail and so we decided to make a website which we could put and collect data through analytics and engagement, but with our approach being ‘sarcastic dystopia’, we have to find the balance between humour and facts, so that it does not go into speculative comedy or story-telling but is still speculative design and thinking, and it gets our message across to the stakeholders, and the important part is to gain feedback from the stakeholders.

After this we got to working on different layouts for the website design, and decided to make it a scroll-type design with a lot of brain storming involved in it, and divided the tasks among our group based on our skill set and worked accordingly. I was in charge of getting the research and infographics done and putting them up on our collaborative workspace for easy access. I mostly looked at articles from the government and international organizations to get statistical data.

On Wednesday, we had the workshop about ‘Agency & Social Rights’, which talked about positionality, accountability, responsibility, and biases, alongside basic social rights for individuals. I found it particularly interesting and engaging how my ‘positionality’ can induce so many conscious and sub-conscious biases in my research and how I can reflect better to be more aware of it, and address it.

The workshop also dealt with the ‘uncertainties’ we might face as future workers and how we must exercise curiosity, empathy, and agency to be more adaptable and be a step ahead of technology, and also exercise control, but what are the consequences of exercising these skills/tools in our daily life as workers/skilled professionals? I personally believe that as we are staying ahead of the very technology we develop to still be relevant in the workspace, we learn and adapt new skills at the cost of discomfort, in ways we may like or not like and this discomfort sometimes puts us at risk, knowingly or unknowingly and sometimes dangerous, not dangerous, but it is our perception of what is our boundary of stepping outside our comfort zone that determines to what level we can adjust and adapt, but is all this adaptation going to make us happy? I don’t know because in my life the more knowledge and understanding i have gained, the more numb I become to things, or can I say empathy, since I have the knowledge to look at multiple perspectives, it might make me seem numb or cold to it, but sometimes we do turn a blind eye to a lot of things which are in our control and can be changed.

The website proved to be evidence of our collaboration and as I did more reading into different scenarios, it actually scared me a bit as to how near we can be to complete automation, and I may actually live to see the transition and my speculation, maybe?
Particular reading that stood out to me was the report by McKinsey (A FUTURE THAT WORKS: AUTOMATION, EMPLOYMENT, AND PRODUCTIVITYJANUARY 2017), which talks about how there’s a gap between a theoretical timeframe for automation, and a practical timeframe for automation which is caused by many social, technical and economic factors, and even considering these numerous factors, we might reach complete automation by 2060-2065, which is not that far away and it is quite scary.

A report by the IMF, speculates on how the countries might adapt to automation and AI, and their preparedness for it, although I do not fully understand the economics behind it, it is quite interesting to see how only low-skill or medium-skill jobs will be replaced, whereas high skill jobs will not be prone to replacement, and this got me thinking about my future as a creative, and in my process of research, but in due course and doing other tasks such as generating a script and video, we as a group thought it would show a narrative that we can develop technology to do everything but compiling everything and forming a narrative and explaining it and implementing it is something it will not be able to do, and henceforth, technology is a tool for us, rather than a fear.

In the process of generating a script with ChatGPT, I had to reiterate the prompts numerous times to get my desired results, which shows a particular level of expectation and standard which is achievable by humans, even in the video generation process, I had to remodify and substitute videos so that it became more cohesive and communicated the message more clearly which involved understanding the psychology of the target audience, because what Pictory.ai did was it just took the words from the script and found related stock videos to it, and compiled it in a time frame, which does not convey the message clearly, which rebuilds my confidence that I, as a creative can not be replaced.

In addition to this research, we have to come up with the incubator, which is a space to test our scenarios and gain feedback on the project and make tiny, necessary tweaks to it, which i shall talk about more in the next entry.

Future of Work- wk.1&2

This unit allows us to collaborate with another course on the department which is MA-CCC.

This unit asks us to speculate the future of work and our readings included sci-fi articles, which confused me at first and made no sense as to how this is relevant to the course but I still read and understood the text. The following morning during the orientation, the pieces started coming together and esp. after the lecture and tutorial, I understood that the readings were to understand the principles of speculation through sci-fi. I particularly liked the article about BLACK MIRROR by Sergio Uruena. https://andphilosophy.com/2019/12/16/enacting-reflection-through-sci-fi/

In our group, all of us come from an Asian background with experience in creative industries, and during our conversations in the tutorial, lot of topics revolved to the difference between Asian and Western work culture, and how the Asian work culture is a product of a result-based culture and society which prioritises and asks for more performance in order to stand out, and prioritising work is a sign of a “good” employee, whereas in the Western culture, work-life balance is prioritised. One of my team-mates brought up an interesting example from her experience stating that how in the same MNC, Asian counterparts worked longer hours than their Western counterparts in the exact same role, and this resonated with me, and the group, so we decided to pursue this topic. https://www.brightinternships.com/blog/east-vs-west-5-different-working-cultures

This topic led us to several discussions around class, western colonisation, privilege, access, caste system, result-based culture, etc.

During one of our reflective activities we were asked to come up with problems that seemed impossible to solve and coming from an Indian creative background, I shared my experience on how the caste system plays a major role in employment, education, and work roles in the creative industries.https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276549 The referenced article shows quantitative data done by the government to show the gap and discrimination in employment based on caste. This also seemed to resonate and intrigue the group, and it led us to study more on why there is a huge difference in the work culture, our research personally resonated with me, since I have been affected by the system.

Now, that we had decided on a topic to speculate upon, we had to choose an industry to speculate and research in, logic dictates we speculate in the creative industry since we already have a good understanding of the culture, but we were advised against and asked to try and go out of our comfort zone. I personally believe that going out of our comfort zone is where we learn and expand our skills.

I figured any industry with a difference in work culture would be tech, since I have observed the difference in culture with my relatives who work in tech abroad v/s India. I also noticed a difference in culture in the hospitality industry after I moved to London, since here everyone adheres to working hours. We also looked at surface-level differences in logistics, export-import, and warehousing, but reached the conclusion that there may not be much difference since the jobs are manual and hence require similar effort.

Circling back to ‘Asian v/s Western’ culture, in the tech industry, we quickly proceeded to do some background research on where the disparity lies and what we can focus on speculating. During our tutorial and reflection, I felt that our topic was too wide and we could probably narrow down the scenario to speculate, while brainstorming with our tutor, we reached a point where we seemed to draw a few common points between tech and hospitality, namely burn out, stress, privilege and access, rapid technologisation in the industry.

Looking a little deeper into each topic, I discovered burnout is an increasingly rising phenomenon among tech employees. This also reminded me of an article I came across, speculating how human bodies are going to change in the next thousand years.1. https://www.cio.com/article/657960/burnout-an-it-epidemic-in-the-making.html https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/2022/11/05/6366c061ca4741d11d8b4575.html#

The hospitality sector is known to be one of the most stressful sectors and post-covid the impacts are being much more spoken about, and brought to light, but how do we mix the two industries?https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/restaurant-employee-burnout/

On a surface level, most tech companies have canteens and post-covid, and in an attempt to return to office culture, tech companies are spending to intrigue employees into coming to offices and working there.https://www.wired.co.uk/article/return-to-work-office-cost

Post-COVID, hospitality in major cities has taken a toll due to the aforementioned lack of employees in various companies, and we noticed the two are inter-related but focusing on both industries would be a big task considering time restraints, so we chose to focus on hospitality in tech. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/04/10/the-real-reason-why-companies-are-desperately-pushing-for-people-to-return-to-the-office/

Now, another major concern in speculation with the hospitality industry is that technology, (here AI, robots, software, AR/VR) is slowly replacing many workers in the industry. For example, fast food chains have self-ordering and self-checkout kiosks, which reduces human jobs. Hotel chains have self-check-in kiosks, and also robots that can help you with housekeeping or general chores, this poses a problem in speculating a ‘Future of Work’, but this is currently the scenario we’re speculating, which would create an impact to think how the very technology we develop is potentially going to replace us, and is there anything we can do about it?

A tangent to tech replacing jobs and the concept of burn-out led me to a question, ‘How are human interactions going to be?’, and more interestingly, how it would affect the workplace. This question arises from a personal perspective of how technology has overwhelmed us, and the latest generation in the workplace a.k.a., Gen-Z who are facing challenges in navigating the work culture, esp. in terms of soft skills and communication, and speculating this would create an impact on how technology which was meant to bring us closer, is the one creating problems in communication and relationships, which led to me thinking about, ‘Is this the very technology that we develop drive us apart and we cease to become a society/civilization?’ The below-mentioned articles talks about the preference of Gen-Z to work from home and their lack of soft skills https://www.theforage.com/blog/basics/generation-z-statistics https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/future-work/articles/gen-z-graduates-prefer-remote-or-hybrid-work/ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-z-lacking-soft-skills-181047079.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANx4TjgnrzQ6Sa1_qjwzgeLFEWMURSJWtWKdFLSrvlSjuBhr9xgEHD-TaFe6D5qc7S5pyJ4XL-OeAZqVWPZkVPRgW81s-5N9PPTCDXAxlPSruy0bB9NZSEaEulIW1T-Rn9OeKZaXicHDWeLGmBds_4Bt-oe_6WPU10IzQBp8weov The below mentioned article talks about how technology is affecting inter-personal relationships https://www.medicinenet.com/can_technology_destroy_relationships/article.htm

The aforementioned concerns talk about how technology is rapidly replacing jobs, and how this is going to affect the workplace dynamics and hence our society at large. In this context, we’re treating the tech company as a society, and trying to see how new technologies affect the dynamics among employees (people), in a formal and informal setting, the interaction of employees with the hospitality employees, which roughly translates to social interaction in an informal setting, and in turn seeing how technology developed to make hospitality better is going to affect this scenario.

This led me to approach a friend of mine, Rishabh Kumar, co-founder of Angoor.ai, and an interaction designer and we had a little chat regarding the topic of how technology might replace jobs, and his take was that this might happen in a digital capacity, rather than in a robotic capacity, and the only limitation was the slow advancement in energy storage and referred me to look into the ‘Kardashev scale’ we also talked about how AI was a blessing and a curse for designers, since we’re both designers and that it sometimes helps the process and sometimes it does not and so it can’t be definitive that it may replace our positions. Anyway, when I asked him how he feels about the workplace dynamics with respect to technological advancement since he is in a managerial capacity, he pointed out that the speed in advancement between technology-culture-biology might be a way to look at it, and studying the data would be helpful, and so a lot of insight has been provided in one conversation, which I shared with the group and we’re going to look at multiple aspects.

In the past two weeks, I have dove head first into the unknown territory of work and technology and trying and speculate a future in this, although the process is pretty overwhelming, it is quite fun to walk in unknown territory and explore it with people who are interested, curious and willing to also step into unknown territory. Even though initially, we had an approach to contrast and compare cultures, I believe our process and critical thinking led us to the point we are at right now, and have set a direction for the scenario we’re speculating. Although working on something tech, AI-related, hospitality or even work is something I’m unaware it is interesting to see how the initial readings of sci-fi articles had helped me gain an understanding of principles of speculation and to me, it seems like we’re trying to write a science fiction story about a tech and hospitality workplace as close to reality as possible. All of my readings/ research has shown me that maybe technology is replacing jobs, and will hinder inter-personal relationships, and I think this blog is proof enough of the current scenario we’re speculating since I can just as easily do this as a presentation in front of a group of people, and it will appeal and connect to an audience, but is a blog (developed through technology) appealing and connecting?