ENVISIONING A STUDY BY ENVISIONING TECHNOLOGY …/media/Pdf/BUK/Spark/THE... · 2015-01-27 ·...

A STUDY BY ENVISIONING TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPED EXCLUSIVELY FOR BROTHER

ENVISIONINGTHE FUTUREWORKSPACEOffices as we know them are unlikely to disappear in our lifetimes. However, these spaces where we convene ideas, join forces, manage and learn, will morph as ever-accelerating change profoundly alters the very nature of work. As will the infrastruc-ture in which work is practiced. Ubiquitous connectivity devours time and space while the essence of our interaction with the workspace - our peers, the information that surrounds us, and the machines we use to communicate - is irreversibly transformed.

This report and the accompanying map examines the technologically changing work-space - and how workers will adopt to it. It also exemplifies four distinct professional archetypes to frame the impact of this cultural and technological transformation: the leader, the penpusher, the creative nomad and the labourer.

THE PENPUSHER

THE LABORER

THE LEADEROrganizes, inspires and motivates a team or a taskforce, distributing responsibilities into different types of workforces. Offers means to manipulate information and human interactions.

Physically manipulates material, for example on the factory floor, but can also re-motely and instantly interact with complex infrastructure dealing with data analysis.

Generates ideas, clarifies the complex, connects concepts and explores the boundaries created by technology - like those of space and time.

Manipulates the information space, organizing the order of priorities that enable a steady and natural flow inside all the forms of the office space.

THE CREATIVE NOMAD

ARCHETYPES

2ENVISIONING THE FUTURE WORKSPACE

THE LEADERMedical monitoring technology and workplace monitoring systems will give leaders unprecedented insight into the people they are leading. The role of leaders in inspiring and motivating their workforce will be as important as making the strategic decisions that currently take up most of their time.

On a micro level, the leader will see minute-by-minute data on blood-cortisol levels of their team, prompting investigation of causes for high levels and reassignment of work. On a macro level, a dashboard of employee satisfaction will aggregate multiple data streams per employee, giving real-time feedback on how the organi-sation, itself a complex organism, is changing to the world around it.

And this feedback will be necessary. There will be no shortage of change in the world of tomorrow. Although the data and analytical techniques available to support decision-making will expand markedly, they will always be one step behind the complexity of the world and leaders will continue to rely on gut instinct.

The leader’s insight into hearts and minds isn’t in its use confined to the boundaries of the organisation. The people-focused skill set, together with a hefty dose of creativity and data analysis are required for the perfect marketer, a career that is unlikely to diminish in importance in the coming decades.


THE CREATIVE NOMADAs advances in automation and robotics increasingly rob humans of those jobs that don’t rely on our higher-level skills, the role of the creator will become the centre of attention: the idyll that everyone aspires to. Com-petition to be the most creative, the most original will heighten, and the rewards for the top-end creative will reach astronomical levels.

With algorithmic content generation churning out passable new content in outrageous volumes, the lower and middle tier creatives will find life more difficult. But the top-end creative, who can transcend the abilities of the even the most powerful computers, using uniquely human insight, will be all the more prized.

Creators will find it difficult to keep up with the mass of creative tools that continue to proliferate in a Cam-brian explosion of choice: tools that inspire; tools that mutate your creations; tools that allow you to build. Creators will come to rely on these tools to a point where they’re unable to create without them.


THE PENPUSHERThe penpusher archetype represents those current office roles that revolve around responding to e-mails, attending meetings, preparing documents and entering data. The penpusher creates and manipulates the information world, typically in a digital format or recorded on paper.

The penpusher’s office life will be revolutionised by an explosion of screens, communicating information to the penpusher from every conceivable location. Locking yourself in a toilet cubicle to escape from the desk? Think again. Sensors in the cubicle detect who you are and display your email on a screen on the back of the door.

AI assistants will make life easier without the “defenestrate-the-computer” irritation that accompanied Mi-crosoft’s infamous paperclip. These assistants will scan the data penpushers are working on, identify key terms and look these up in local and online databases, pushing the resulting data to users.

Changes in workplace culture will affect penpushers the most. With monitoring technology allowing em-ployee performance assessments on a greater scale than previously possible (or even conceivable), work will be increasingly gamified, with scoreboards updated in real-time and published for everyone to see.


THE LABOURERThe labourer archetype represents those current roles where people use their hands to manipulate the physi-cal world (albeit via machines in most instances). This includes farming and resource extraction, transporta-tion, manufacturing, construction and physical maintenance.

The labourer of the future is the occupation most at risk to become obsolete through the rise of automation technologies. Already, Apple’s iPad factory is looking to replace a million workers with a million robots; Google’s self-driving car technology will steal jobs from the transportation sector (road haulage, the postal system, couriers, shopping delivery, take-away food delivery).

Yet many automation technologies, despite their sophistication, remain dumb in their understanding of the world. Many labourer roles will not cease to exist, but will transition to robot supervision and maintenance. One worker that supervises ten robots that previously did his or her job means a ten-fold increase in produc-tivity per person.

And there will be a fair number of physical world jobs that remain beyond reach of the ever-advancing ro-bots: don’t expect the plumbing in your house to be fixed cheaply, quickly and reliably by a robot. Tasks like that can’t easily be pre-programmed and require interpretation of the physical environment – skills that will remain beyond our AI assistants for the foreseeable future.


The most striking thing about the offices of the future will be that automated modularity and eInk wallpaper mean it looks different from moment to moment, from day to day. The walls on a Friday afternoon will overflow with colour as employees wind down for the weekend, but resume a professional blue as clients arrive for a meeting the follow-ing Monday.

Flexible spaces will transform from a meeting room, to a conference room, to an employee games room, all at the push of a button. Economy of space will be essential in the tightly packed cities of tomorrow.

Today’s video-conferencing facilities will be replaced by holographic suites or augmented reality bays, allowing one office to connect seamlessly with another, enabling home-workers to participate almost as though they were in the office. When activities are not confined to a holographic or augmented reality meeting, remote workers will explore the office via telepresence robots, potentially even humanoid looking ones or with holographic projections of their faces. The water cooler moments of the future will be the snatched conversations at the telepresence robot charging points.

Our current cubicle arrangements will be replaced by virtual cubicles relying on noise reduction technology and ultra-sonic sound projection to contain workers in a concentra-tion bubble. From here workers will create and manipulate documents stored in the cloud, often synchronously collabo-rating on the same document in real-time.

For the prestigious law firm, where underutilised books of law still line the walls despite their contents being more frequently looked up online, maintaining a nostalgic author-ity will preclude adoption of some of the more avantgarde technologies such as holographic suites. But even here, less conspicuous technologies, employee health monitoring for example, will gain a foothold.

The fountain pens will faultlessly capture in digital form the flourishes of those who choose to show off their abilities in the long-dead art of writing. Likewise, voice recognition is a discrete addition to an oak-panelled office.

Workforce trends will have an impact on this, too. Advances in regenerative medicine (e.g. stem cell therapy), for exam-ple, will mean workers can continue to work far beyond current retirement ages. Not that these workers will look or seem old, as regenerative medicine improves appearance along with physical and cognitive ability.

THE OFFICE THE OFFICE OF THE TECHNOREFUSENIK


As the frontiers of human knowledge and technology converge, the length of the frontier expands: with every question we answer come two new questions; with every development new opportunities to explore arise. Industries seldom die, but new types of businesses and new types of work are being created at an explosive rate.

It is impossible to predict which technological thread will be at the fore at any point in the future, but its safe to say that the businesses of the future will be increasingly driven by innovation, by new technology and by creativity. The vast frontier that humanity is collectively exploring will have plenty of room for small nibble organisations, with ad-hoc teams generating cutting-edge output to short timescales.

The company of the future will be global by default (and in some cases multiplanetary): distributed manufacturing, advanced manufacturing technologies (e.g. 3D printing) and automated distribution allow physical product mak-ers to easily sell to the whole world; information services are already transnational. The only sectors that will retain a geographical focus are services in the physical domain, hair salons for example. But even here telepresence robots threaten to globalise the work: imagine a haircut from a hair stylist on the other side of the world: their actions replicated to sub-millimetre accuracy by a robotic avatar. Perhaps only the brave will opt for a cut-throat shave delivered by such a service.

THEBUSINESS

The global nature of every organisation makes for a hyper-competitive landscape: the challenge of being heard in the cacophony of 10 billion voices will be acute. Savvy consum-ers will be largely immune to the torrent of advertising they are subject to, leaving word-of-mouth as the most viable and most coveted route to market. And just as getting the message out is difficult, so will be dealing with the volume of information coming in – with extremely high numbers of participants and rapid pace of change, staying up-to-date about the environment a business is operating in will be a major challenge.


The office of the future will be dominated by the means of conveying visual information. Already, many workers sit in front of multiple screens, each bigger than the TVs they grew up watching (and with greater resolution too). The eventual winner in this race to harness our eyes is unclear, but there are many strong competitors. The outcome will dictate in large part the office of the future.

If head-mounted displays (HMDs - the descendants of Google’s Glass project and Brother’s AiRScouter) rule the roost, the office itself with be less technological. It would be likely that the bring-your-own-device trend would expand to such devices, with employees using different makes and models to suit their needs. Contact lens displays and dis-plays embedded in user’s retinas are a logical extension of the head mounted display concept and would again tip the balance of technology to the user rather than the office.

With the technology housed in or on the user, the office itself could be extremely flexible in its form, and potentially mini-malist in its nature as content could be added via augment-ed reality. One employee may prefer an office decorated in purple with an abundance of plants, another employee may prefer cool blue with no plants to be seen. Both can be ac-commodated via augmented reality.

By contrast, 3D displays, touch surfaces and the falling cost of larger screens promise a technological office. Today’s workstation would be extended into the third dimension with workers effortlessly manipulating information with gestures in a 3D space. Meeting rooms would benefit from wall-high screens to display shared information to all par-ticipants, whilst collaboration happens on a touch-sensitive display surface.

SMART USERS VS. SMART OFFICE

The computer input devices of the future are diverse, but the location of the sensors is likely to follow the dominant visual information technology. If HMDs become dominant, the 3D scanner (for gesture recognition) and microphone (for voice recognition) will be housed on the headset; if workstations persist, these sensors will be housed in the workstation.


The occupations of the future will increasingly prize creativ-ity (see the creator) and people skills (see the leader), but aside from these abilities the are a number of other compe-tencies essential for the workplace of tomorrow:

THE SKILLS OF THE FUTURE

The internet has been described as trying to drink from a fire hose, and whilst human enhancement will make our information-processing abilities more powerful, those with a natural edge will succeed

Making the most of our ubiquitous computers will require programming skills to be disseminated to a wider and wider pool of the population, and at increasing levels of abstraction. The programmers of the future will leave the matching parenthesis to well-designed software, concentrat-ing the on the conceptual and interface layers of software development

There will be no shortage of data in our connected future. And all that data needs to be stored and managed in an ef-ficient and resilient manner

As with database management, but relying on a different skill set, someone will need to use all this data to make informed decisions

PROGRAMMING

LEARNING / INFORMATION ABSORPTION DATABASE MANAGEMENT

DATA ANALYSIS


Some emerging technologies are hinting at a workplace of tomorrow that might be the utopia of learning, teamwork and creativity we are hoping for. Take for example, Ama-zon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk): the production line concept applied to the information arena – each worker not knowing the whole process they’re engaged in, just repetitively turn-ing a (mental) handle.

At its logical extreme, an AI entity could outsource discrete repetitive tasks where humans are still better (thanks to the massively-parallel, analogue computers that are our brains). With gamification, we humans could be living from fix-to-fix as our actions further strengthen our AI overlords; virtual worlds become virtual slavery.

And even if such pessimistic extremes do not come to pass, there is a strong possibility that we will end up interacting more with robots and AI entities than we do with real hu-mans, making the workplace of the future a lonely one.

THE DARKER SIDE OFTOMORROW’S WORKPLACE


As her brainwaves indicate she’s leaving deep sleep, the monitor-ing computer sends a signal to a smart capsule in her arm releas-ing stimulants into her blood. Pear begins to stir. Her side of the bed gently and silently lifts. Awake now, she swings her legs off the side of the bed and pads quietly out of the sleeping chamber. Her partner Aaron is left completely undisturbed.

In the antechamber, Pear changes into her swimming costume, whilst dictating to the computer her emotional memories of her dreams (the visual component is already captured for analysis by monitoring of the visual cortex). She puts a robe on over the top and heads to the lift. Swimming is the only exercise still endorsed by health experts, and like most new apartment blocks, Pear’s has a swimming pool in the basement.

As she enters the pool room she sees her performance log dis-played on a large screen. She pauses for a second to take stock. Yesterday wasn’t a good time. Going to push harder today. She speaks out loud the name of a particularly motivating rock track. The music begins playing in the air around her directed via ul-trasound from a speaker on the wall. She dives into the pool, the bubble of music following her as she tries to make up for yester-day’s poor effort.

The music is briefly interrupted to let Pear know her time – a solid performance, much better than yesterday. She winds down with a couple of lengths of backstroke, reviewing video data and a heart rate monitor graph on the ceiling above the pool. Whilst swimming she speaks a note to the pool computer to remind her to focus on her right arm motion.

In the lift back to her flat, Pear casts her eye over her agenda for the day, displayed on a screen on the wall. Although there are other people in the lift, the screen displays the information at an angle only Pear can read – the others see their own content.

As she enters her apartment, a gentle ping indicates her porridge is ready, timed to perfection with her leaving the pool, and with sweetness and temperature just right. Removing the bowl from the omni-cook, she sits at the kitchen counter. A video series that she’s been watching starts playing automatically.

When she’s finished with breakfast she heads to the wardrobe (walk-in, of course), the bowl left on the side to be washed up by the cleaning robot. A screen on the wardrobe wall suggests an outfit based on Pear’s emotional state, last night’s dreams, the weather, her meetings today, and a whole host of other factors. But she decides to be spontaneous and grabs a dress from a hanger. Despite their sophistication, robots can’t plan for human whim.

Heading downstairs, she jumps into the nearest personal rapid transit (PRT) vehicle, which, sensing her identity via near-field communication, makes a guess at her destination and heads off. “Another day in the office”, Pear thinks to herself. Not that it’s called an office anymore, marketing wasn’t happy with that name and came up with “ProdPod”. And come to think of it, it’s not much like the offices of yesteryear anyway. True, people go there to work. But the building itself is so alive, so responsive. Although it’s not always fun, Pear looks forward to work – there’s enough human interaction, games and camaraderie to tide through boring bits.

Arriving at the ProdPod, Pear exits the vehicle, which heads off to find another human to serve. Entering the building, she takes the lift up to her floor. Upon entering, the colours of the walls change, almost imperceptibly, adopting a colour that maximises productivity of all the people on that floor (each person has a unique colour that motivates them the most, and the building computer seeks to maximise motivation).

The floor is a vast open space, littered with desks, chairs, sofas and beanbags. There are ad hoc “meeting rooms” where these have been brought together, areas where people are working side by side in teams, and areas where people spread out for privacy. Most noticeably, or in fact least noticeably, the ProdPod is very quiet. Pear can see people talking, but thanks to active noise reduction, all that background noise is cancelled out.

A DAY IN THE LIFE


Pear sinks into a comfy armchair next to one of her closest cow-orkers. As she opens her mouth to speak, the active noise reduc-tion system diminishes in that area so the conversation carries from one armchair to the next. They exchange pleasantries, and a quick verbal update on the project they’re working on.

Pear checks her personal dashboard on a holographic screen that appears in front of her. E-mail was finally replaced several years back, with its multiple uses spread out across better-suited, dedicated systems - all brought together in a single dashboard. There’s a single “to do” list, capturing all of Pear’s tasks (both those she’s set herself and those set by her team members), there’s a list of information to read, there’s a tracker for tasks Pear has set other people, and there are details of meetings arranged and to be arranged.

Pear starts with a task at the top of her list (all items are weight-ed based on urgency and importance). It links through to some information she needs to digest. She begins reading the informa-tion, then flicks to a video as the content is heavy-going – video is much easier to digest. She sits back in her armchair to watch. With a couple of simple gestures she orders an iced tea, delivered to her armchair by a hospitality robot.

With the video completed, Pear finishes a couple of tasks. Work is reduced to simple components as much as possible, often with many of the steps in the task-chain completed by AI. Feeling restless, Pear moves to a tread-mill desk. Establishing a relaxed walking pace, she continues working on her tasks, arranging a couple of meetings where tasks will benefit from the input of several people.

Pear begins prepping for a meeting that afternoon. It’s an impor-tant one, with a key customer coming in, so she prepares a couple of documents in advance.

With a few more tasks under her belt, Pear heads to lunch. The value of a shared lunch with coworkers is one of the reasons people still congregate for work, rather than working in the virtual ProdPods, or appearing only via a telepresence robot. The canteen is particularly good, and free to employees. Pear sits with a group of six who chat about their day, exchanging thoughts and ideas. It took a few years to become accepted, but now most people use active conversation suggestion, where a computer whispers algorithmically selected conversational topics and responses into peoples’ ears.

Back at her “desk” Pear knocks out another couple of tasks – as they’re less cognitively draining, she decides to listen to back-ground music as she works. Thanks to the active noise reduction, she doesn’t need to wear headphones, working in a bubble of music. She’s interrupted by a notification that her visitors have entered the lift and are heading up. Her colleagues are likewise notified and they congregate at the entrance to greet the visitors.

The meeting goes well, the clients appreciating the well thought through presentation and the opportunity to scribble down some ideas. Pear is confident that she’s onto a sale. After the meet-ing, she sits down with her manager to review a recording of the meeting and analyse the outcome. No detail is left unconsidered: the monitoring technology picks up on the subtlest body lan-guage and tone of voice of the meeting participants. Where the analysis suggests a particular way of explaining the product is effective, this is logged and made instantly available to the rest of Pear’s team.

Pear’s manager uses the opportunity to discuss recent perfor-mance and health information, praising Pear’s strong perfor-mance in the pool that morning, but cautioning her on elevated levels of blood cortisol in advance of the meeting. A manager’s access to such personal performance information would have worried people decades previously, but has become the new norm: workers have traded their privacy for an employment relation-ship where employers take health very seriously.

Work done for the day, Pear heads out of the office. A notification in her earpiece let’s her know Aaron has left his office. He’s run-ning late again, thinks Pear, and with a couple of words to her smartphone she adds a cheeky reminder to his calendar to ensure he leaves on time tomorrow.

Jumping into the nearest PRT vehicle she heads to the Virtual Reality Dome where she’s due to take in the latest VR experience. Aaron gets there five minutes later, his workplace being on the other side of town. Together they enter the poly-senso-ry experi-ence that transports them to another world.


Our research sits at the intersection of qualitative and quantitative forecasts. Inspiration about emerging technologies on the horizon is drawn from reading scientific publications, gadget announcements and techno-cultural magazines. This ongoing research allow us to form forecasts and visualizations by synthesizing speculations from various perspectives.

From understanding how distinct technologies rely differently on exponen-tial growth and through mapping relative dependencies between individual areas of research, we arrive at a speculative vision of the near future.

METHODOLOGY


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Envisioning Technology is an award-winning trend forecasting studio with people in London, São Paulo and New York.

We care about where technology is heading in the future, and we publish & discuss our research as visualizations, keynotes and bespoke reports.

ENVISIONING A STUDY BY ENVISIONING TECHNOLOGY …/media/Pdf/BUK/Spark/THE... · 2015-01-27 ·...

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