The first week was about coordinating and context, and as a start to thinking about future work, I began by looking back at my past work experience. Almost all of my jobs have been internships or part-time, and it is clear that these jobs not only pay very little but also have very long working hours and no insurance coverage, especially in the art industry where this is very common. What could go wrong, how to keep these problems from happening?

In the first tutorial, we brainstormed several topics that have arisen in the current working environment:

1. Women’s rights.

2. Payment issues.

3. Labour rights.

4. The barriers to work are too high and people need a lot of experience to be able to apply for a job.

5. There are a lot of special words in the work environment, for example, in some Chinese companies, retrenched employees are called graduates, and colleagues are called family members, all of which are used to hide the oppression of the company’s employees by embellishing the words.

6. The company’s facilities are too comprehensive, in order to make the staff work longer, such as Google.

7. Automation leads to unemployment of people.

8. Due to the downturn in the economy, a large number of companies are laying off their employees, more and more people are unemployed, and many people choose to create new careers.

In the reading section, I was most interested in “Enacting Reflection Through Sci-fi”, Sergio Urueña suggested that sci-fi can be a valuable resource for promoting responsible innovation, aligning social values with technological practices through anticipatory governance and responsible innovation frameworks. This reminds me of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” created by Douglas Adams in 1979. It imagines a lot of products that have already been invented nowadays, which were very much ahead of their time, such as a watch that could make a phone call, a car that could drive in water, etc. It was certainly ahead of its time. I was amazed at his imagination and foresight, which reminded me not to let the limitations of modern technology restrict my imagination of the future.

Then the group shared about ” The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, which presented a different perspective of carrying things instead of the hero’s journey. Ursula e Guin introduces the idea that humans invented containers like bags and baskets way before weapons. This brought a broader and inclusive point of view, carrying can free us from many problems cause everything just contains. Based on our initial discussions, we all want to create a joyful future world where people, nature, and animals can co-exist as equals in the utopian. Although we haven’t decided who the future work is for, we would like to start from the job for survival, coincidentally this weekend delivery workers are going on a strike, this brings a good entry point to look into.

Based on our initial discussions, we all want to create a joyful future world where people, nature, and animals can co-exist as equals in the utopian. Although we haven’t decided who the future work is for, we would like to start from the job for survival, coincidentally this weekend delivery workers are going on a strike, this brings a good entry point to look into.