Alpha Health

Theme: Work

Work instability

The platformisation of employment

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Automation and Climate Change will cause huge turmoil in economies. People may be working online, based on their chosen field or ‘gig’, and move in search of better economic environments, reputation will become ever more vital as people have to quickly and consistently reestablish themselves.  We will see more online platforms supporting offline gig workers’ skills.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we can speculate about the converging of multiple trends around remote working, adapting skills set and a new focus on wellbeing.

The rapid and constant flux in the world means that workforces need to adapt and evolve rapidly, putting an increased focus on people’s skills rather than their knowledge and potentially lead to the escalation of skills training within the workplace. Work could easily become intertwined with education making it a lifelong process of development and reinvention rather than a specific period in our lives. To facilitate this change, more inclusive, skills-based, education platforms like Udemy, Lynda, SkillShare and hundreds more may expand to challenge expensive, formal education systems.

At the same time, technology is also changing the workspace landscape l, by allowing out-of-office communication and remote working. The number of employees working flexibly in their own time and space may continue to increase because it is often seen as healthier, more inclusive and more productive.

In this scenario, work shifts from a career with a singularly defined role and a part of your identity, to an activity that your evolving skills set and attributes make you good at. It may realign wellbeing alongside work and make professions available to anyone in the world with an internet connection.  

We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
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What might that mean for Wade?

For people like Wade, who value work based on the stability it brings them, we can explore how services may evolve that support that stability or challenge it further.

When things are out of my control, I have enough life experience to know it’s gonna’ be fine and push through.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Scenarios

Blended Work-Home-Travel

The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.

Wade has never had what he would call ‘a career’, only jobs. He never went to university, instead opting to pursue his passion for music. He was briefly professional, but always had to do other jobs as well. He still considers himself a musician, but does it more as a hobby than anything he would put on a business card. Instead, he works a range of odd jobs to get by. His friends, including his soon to be wife, are people he met while working in the local garden centre.

He is happiest when he is in control of his direction in life and when he has time to pause and be reflective. He believes no one else is in control but him and chooses to never rely on others unless it’s absolutely necessary. He doesn’t define himself by his career and instead looks for purpose in other things such as being a good friend, a good fiancée, and a good brother.

His goals

Wade’s goals are to find stability, so he does not have to scrape by each month.He wants to be more recognised for things he enjoys doing. Ultimately, he wants to find more meaning from his passions and relationships with the people around him.

For people like Wade, work is never permanent, it is  a means to get by and enjoy the smaller things in life.

Explorations in ‘Work instability’

We explore the future in this scene by looking for potential points of friction between this scenario of work instability and the needs of someone like Wade. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

  • What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? 
  • What is already happening in some way? 
  • What harm may these services do? 
  • What might prevent services such as these proliferating? 
  • What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
01

Prepare

Prepare is an insurance service that assesses how vulnerable your current work and location is and helps you plan and take proactive decisions to prevent that. It provides an assessment of your skills, competencies and work situation, a simulation of future conditions related to your job role and preparation plans and suggestions on how to keep pace with future job conditions, as well as courses and training programmes to re-skill you for the future.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service visions

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self employed people who work at home by helping them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and by helping you build a working routine.
Find out how we ‘Conducted studio explorations’.
Read More
02

Gig-off football league

Gig-off is a football league for gig-economy workers. The league is a tool to raise interest from workers of different platforms such as Uber, Lyft or Deliveroo to encourage them to become part of the Union for the Independent Workers of Great Britain(IWGB).

The league has been designed w to help gig-economy workers live healthily by offering environmental support. It is also a way for them to unite and build power, so they are more resilient for the changes they might face in the future.

Team:
Cristina Mogollón García
Jae Sun Park
Kiyohiro Izumo
Paulien van Rijckevorsel
Taeyeon Kim
Amogh Luxminarayanan

Jump to:

Service visions

Digital Drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans. The range of options is ever expanding.
Find out how we ‘Crafted service concepts’.
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03

U-path

U-Path is an online service that aims to shift the mindset of learning to work, towards a mindset of working to learn.
It is a learning platform that helps employees build their career paths to match the changes in their profession according to the company’s goals. It provides trustworthy and reliable information about the future of their profession and skills needed to stay up to date.

Team:
Agata Juszkiewicz
HwangJoo Kim
Kin Man Cammy Sha
Pinja Piipponen
Shamim Bakhit

Jump to:

Propositions

Pyro

Pyro has the best access to the latest and safest physical and mental augmentations on the market. As soon as these products and services are on the market, you can get them from us.

04

Dough

‘Dough’ is a digital peer to peer discovery app that helps young people better understand themselves and others in the work world, so they find the right jobs. Using short videos created by young professionals, it aims to inspire young people about the future possibilities of work by showing them relevant, stimulating and informative content, such as subtle details that a job description will not convey like the work environment or the team.

Team:
Alison Rosam
Donglin Kim

Jump to

Scenarios

Blended Work-Home-Travel

The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.

05

Mirror

Mirror helps young people find more fulfilling work lives by enabling personal development alongside their careers and involving lifestyle in job searches, unlike the many career networks that are solely career focused service.

Young people gain more agency in building a career that aligns with their interests and they can explore and learn new things without wasting time. Mirror also provides a service for employers, with benefits including access to real-time attitudes and behaviour data, adding valuable information for HR systems.

Team:
Octavia Coutts
Rhea Belani

06
enlight-explorations-work-instability

Enlight

Enlight is an online platform, which through a self-discovery game, a learning planner and a split public/private profile helps young people to make happier choices about their future, giving them a moment and a space for self-reflection.
By promoting self-awareness and the exploration of different experiences, it can improve the agency people have upon their career choices.

Team:
Francesca Schiboni Grimaldi
Yi Wu

Emerging topics

From these speculative explorations, we see three emerging trends.

Firstly, we see the potential for services that form new ways to bring people together who would otherwise be isolated and vulnerable. This may be unionising or other techniques to fill a void in workplace security that may emerge in the future and ensure that the rights of future workforces are not completely overlooked.

We also see an emergence of services that provide sophisticated matching of people and their job. As jobs become smaller, more nuanced or more modular, choosing between them in a way that gives the correct direction to an individual’s career may become more challenging, you will not know whether this job will move you into the next role with more pay, or the right experience or whether it will help support you and grow your skills in the way you need. It’s also harder than before for employers to fill these roles, so new ways of assessing skills and reputation become critical.

Making these decisions about career may be supported by services that first understand people better. They may learn someone’s characteristics, attributes and strengths in order to find careers that match correctly with their personality and preferred lifestyle choices, so that finding the right job is either a worthwhile experiment or a meaningful stepping stone.

These potential future services represent the evolution of new ways to protect workers and new ways to make the labour market work best for employers and for employees.

Related to ‘Work Instability’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Work instability

The platformisation of employment

Read more
The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills-based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we can speculate about the converging of multiple trends around remote working, adapting skills set and a new focus on wellbeing.

Rapid and constant flux in the world means that workforces need to adapt and evolve rapidly, putting an increased focus on people’s skills rather than their knowledge, potentially leading to the escalation of skills training within the workplace. Work could easily become intertwined with education making it a lifelong process of development and reinvention rather than a specific period in our lives. To facilitate this change, more inclusive, skills-based, education platforms like Udemy, Lynda, SkillShare and hundreds more may expand to challenge expensive, formal education systems.   

At the same time, technology is also changing the workspace landscape by allowing out-of-office communication and remote working. The number of employees working flexibly in their own time and space may continue to increase because it is often seen as healthier, more inclusive and more productive.

In this scenario, work shifts from a career with a singularly defined role and a part of  your identity to an activity that your evolving skills set and attributes make you good at. It may realign wellbeing alongside work and make professions available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. 

We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Melia?

For someone like Melia, the value they take from work is their ability to perform well in flexible job markets, while protecting their well being and balancing all the elements of their life. We explore how services may evolve around people’s new relationship with work.

I want to see the world. When I’m 80 years old, I want to look back and think… ‘what an amazing time I had.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Work instability

Automation and climate change will cause huge turmoil in economies, people may be working online, based on their chosen field or “gig”, and move in search of better economic environments. Reputation will become ever more vital as people have to quickly and consistently re-establish themselves and we will see more online platforms supporting offline gig workers’ skills.

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Melia landed a job at a small tech company straight after university. Her stellar work ethic and knack for reading people brought her a position of influence with matching pay. She quickly became a senior network engineer, and after a few years, she began to take advantage of being able to work wherever she wants. She met her husband while backpacking in the US and he has been a rock for her. Wherever they go they use sharing schemes and services to improve their quality of life.

She derives happiness from learning about the world. Everywhere she goes she likes getting to know people and seeing variations in culture. Travelling does take its toll and she has increasingly found that she wants to stay longer in each place to get more of a sense of stability and routine.

Her goal

Melia’s goal is to be open to new experiences and people as she sees the world but at the same time to maintain some routines and stability.

For people like Melia, work is just a way to have as many new experiences as possible.

Explorations in ‘Blended Work-Home-Travel’

We explore the future in this scene by looking for potential points of friction between this scenario of blended work, home and travel and the needs of someone like Melia. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

01

Marco Polo

Marco Polo is the ‘workation’ agency for digital nomads. Through its advanced search engine for workations, it’s able to match flights, accommodation and your working requirements to host your entire work and holiday combination experience.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service Visions

U-Path

U-Path is an online service that aims to shift the mindset of learning in order to work, towards a mindset of working in order to learn.
Find out how we ‘Conducted studio explorations’.
Read More
02

My home in a box

A premium shipping service for digital nomads to dispatch goods all over the world whenever and wherever you move to. By partnering with shared property platforms, flight companies and shipping companies, ‘My home in a box’ follows your itinerary doing your packing and clearing as you leave one place and then unpacking and decorating in the next, so wherever you go you always feel at home.

Team: The Lab

Service Visions

Child Share

Child share is a matching system based on the needs, experiences and characters of parent types in order to create the perfect ongoing parental network for your child.
Find out how we ‘Crafted service concepts’.
Read More
03

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self-employed people who work at home. It helps them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and helps you build a working routine.

Colo suggests when you and your colo-league could take breaks, so you have the time to talk and find interesting stuff in common. Using Colo while you work also means you earn colo-credits that give you different discounts on activities to do with your colo-leagues.

Team:
Adrian Penalver Madrid
Alessandro Paone
Fanghui Song
Ling-Yuan Lu

Jump to:

Service Visions

Relate

Relate divides your relationship needs into multiple categories so they can be fulfilled by different people that are matched perfectly and arranged for you.
04

Bridge

With increasingly globalised communities, Bridge offers a smart way to reliably make and expand your network leveraging AI and data collection to understand your personality, interest and needs.

Team:
Inji Shin
Jonathan Martell
LiBo Hu

Emerging topics

From these explorations, we can speculate that some services may emerge to bolster areas of life that may be neglected in a more nomadic or decentralised workplace context.  Other services may enhance and build on the opportunity by connecting staff in new types of relationships (internationally or face-to-face) or instilling elements of stability by replicating a sense of home wherever people travel.

We also see opportunities for employers and services to create new types of experience that optimise working life in harmony with your personal life to promote a new level of balance that could boost productivity and wellbeing. Could working holidays be adopted by large companies to connect whole teams in new ways or change a workplace culture?

These explorations illustrate how services may emerge to progress and innovate in the new dynamic nature of workplaces while other services may aim to bring assurance and stability to people.

In each angle of this scenario, we see services and people strive for authenticity in the way they connect and the underlying intent with which they make exchanges (be it social or commercial). We may see new mechanisms for creating and enabling these types of ‘genuine’ experiences.

Related to ‘Work Instability’

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative. The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow

Read more

The forces acting on ‘Work’ in the future

Among the many forces influencing our relationships with work in the future, we explore three areas.

  • The first is about the emergence of more workplace flexibility as people work remotely from all over the world, for varying employers, adjusting the relationships between people’s perceptions of work, home and travel. In this context, we also propose a trend in skills-based, on-the-job learning that may alter the way educational institutions are used and reframe employment purely as a pathway to more advanced skills.
  • At the same time, we explore how platform monopolies promote gig-working, which has the potential to produce even more flexibility in people’s lives, but could also lead to far greater insecurity. In this context, we consider what can be done to support and protect people from this potential insecurity and how their needs may change in the search for employment.
  • Finally we look at the emergence of augmented technology that may make it possible for people to maximise their performance in whatever they do, creating new types of working cultures and raising questions about competition, equality and consent and work/life balance.

With these potential forces acting on people’s relationship with work, we explore three hypothetical Future Scenarios: Blended work-home-travel, Work Instability and Self Expansion.

01

Blended Work-Home-Travel

The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills-based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.

Read more

Jump To:

Service visions

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self employed people who work at home by helping them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and by helping you build a working routine.
Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.
02

Work Instability

Work could easily become intertwined with education making it a lifelong process of development and reinvention rather than a specific period in our lives. To facilitate this change, more inclusive, skills-based, education platforms may expand to challenge expensive, formal education systems.

Read more

Jump To:

Service visions

u-path

U-Path is an online service that aims to shift the mindset of learning in order to work, towards a mindset of working in order to learn.
Find out how we ‘Prioritised the societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.
03

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them, the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Read more

Jump to:

Service visions

Digital drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans.

Recommended readings

Proposition Types

Need Commoditisers

The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change. The advanced digitisation of our lives could result in the quantifying and subsequent unionisation of different aspects of behaviour and the values that drive them.

Proposition Types

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Propositions

Pyro

Pyro has the best access to the latest and safest physical and mental augmentations on the market. As soon as these products and services are on the market, you can get them from us.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Let's Talk!

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

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South Kensington,
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