The Project
Detroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the implications of change endemic to that topic.
For this edition, held October 16-18 2024 at The Jam Handy venue in Detroit, we took as our brief to articulate our perspectives on the future of work by representing our informed insights, professional intutitions, and experienced imaginations in the form of something that we'd look at today as a kind of ‘Employee Manual.’
Chris Butler facilitated the workshop activities and was our master of ceremony on all the days.
We had a special guest — Joe Lindley — who screened elements of his Design Research Film 'Permission to Muck About' and facilitated a Q&A and discussion.
Of course, this presupposes that in this future the idioms of today — ‘work’, ‘employee’, ‘company’, ‘retirement’, ‘money’ (as the canonical representation of value circulation) and so forth, actually exists in the way they do today. This cannot be assumed the case, although one needs a starting point as well as a sense that, even in some possible future, purpose can be understood to as something like ‘creating value’ and that value circulates in some fashion — that is, it moves, can be incremented and decremented, shared, exchanged, etc, in much the same way this ‘money’ stuff does today.
Summary
Detroit Imagines Harder was my 2024 edition of the ‘Imagine Harder’ series of workshops in which attendees collaborate to workshop around a hot topic using Design Fiction, and begin to construct an artifact that represents the implications of change endemic to that topic.
Written By: Julian Bleecker
Semantic Tags DESIGN FICTIONFUTURES OF WORKSEMINARWORKSHOPWORLDBUILDING
detroit-imagines-harder-2024We’re all wondering for one reason or another: what is the future of work?
It’s a very good question — with no clear answers, only hopes, fears, dreams, dread about what we call ‘work’ might become.
How might we organize ourselves in the future in order to collectively create value? What are we creating?
How are we creating value? What kind of tooling, actions, mindsets, ways of knowing are being put to task?
What are valued skills in this future? How are these skills obtained? How has the purpose of what today we call ‘education’ evolved?
How does value circulate in a future we’d like to inhabit? Is there a future in which ‘a job’ means something different to the point that ‘job’ is in the dictionary as “archaic usage”?”
Our approach is to use Design Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Futures Design and Imagination to explore possible evolutions of the ways in which humans (and collaborating non-humans) might organize themselves to create meaning and value.
Our intent is not to predict or prognosticate. We do not want to create a fantasy utopian vision nor a comic book dystopia. Rather we want to imagine into worlds that feel plausible as well as those that push at the edges of what could be and what we would like to inhabit.
Our expansive understanding of ‘work’ cannot just assume that boxes-and-arrows type organizations of human potential are the only, or the future of what it is to create meaning and value. The history of the company reminds us that this is one amongst way of organizing ourselves, and it will not be the last. What are possible futures that make sense beyond the perceived efficiencies of the ‘company’ organization. Are there efficient arrangements that redefine ‘efficient’ in a way that makes work not feel like ‘work’, for example? What has the experiments and prototypes around decentralized organizations both on- and offline taught us about novel arrangements of human activity?
These and other questions were central to our discussions. These are meant to be generative towards our hands-on workshop activites to begin to give shape and form to the discussions through the creation of an artifact that feels like it has come from the futures we describe and imagine.
The first day of Imagine Harder Detroit 2024 was about laying the foundation for the process of speculative design. The team engaged with brainstorming tools like timeboxing and connecting nodes to explore how to merge divergent ideas into meaningful, future-forward concepts. The focus on team-building emphasized creativity and trust.
In the evening, John Marshall and Cezanne Charles showed a prototype of a board game they’ve been developing (at all levels - 3D printing parts, LOS capture with lasers, custom pieces, drones, etc.). It’s a cyberpunk-inspired adversarial chase simulation which they are using a knowledge/research platform to understand the dynamics of urban-based systems of surveillance. Super fun!
Overall, Day 1 set a dynamic, open-ended tone, encouraging participants to challenge conventional thinking and build the framework for the rest of the summit.
On Day 2, participants expanded on speculative frameworks, delving into the practical application of prototypes and scenario planning. The discussions of digital twins, future employee experience, and the dynamics of hybrid human-AI workplaces sparked innovative ideas. The group explored how to balance technological advancements with ethical considerations, ensuring that innovation benefits both humans and digital counterparts. This day fostered a more concrete understanding of how speculative futures might unfold in real-world applications.
Discussions continued to be expansive while also trying to ground the large macro topics into implications.
That is:
How does a macro trend like ‘Digital Twins’ or new kinds of value circulation mechanics — blockchain for example — exhibit itself as a bit of material, a diagram, a description of such if it were to be represented in something like an Employee Manual?
We also had a special exhibition/screening of Joe Lindley’s Design Research film ‘Permission to Muck About’ with an exclusive Q&A with Joe, who also participated in the workshop.
In the afternoon we visited ISAIC (lots of great Design Fictions were found around the facility) and Newlab.
The final day was a half-day that concluded right about when we needed to clear up and clear out of The Jam Handy. It was one where we reflected on the overarching themes of the summit — how speculative design and future-focused thinking can reshape industries and work structures. The creation of flexible, dynamic organizational models emphasized adaptability in a fast-changing world. Conversations about digital ethics, employee well-being, and the evolving nature of work relationships concluded the summit on a visionary note, underscoring the potential of speculative design to offer tangible solutions for future societal challenges. We finalized our ambitions for how to synthesize the material into some kind of ‘output’ that represented the thinking in a way consistent with the Design Fiction epistemology and then went our separate ways.
Additional and constantly evolving notes and subsequent reflections
Some of the most notable Design Fictions from the Imagine Harder Detroit 2024 workshops included:
Where workers and digital twins engage with multiple organizations through an AI-managed platform. This platform matches projects with the most suitable professionals, offering both flexibility for workers and scalability for businesses. The model allows seamless collaboration across projects, enabling workers to take on diverse roles in various industries while maintaining autonomy while keeping their benefits and perks across those different roles.
A future tech company leveraging digital twins for corporate strategy, urban planning, and public policy simulations, with a fluid workforce enabled by AI-driven fractional knowledge work.
An ecosystem where personal and professional digital twins interact to enhance human productivity, well-being, and innovation.
Some moment in which some sort of formal or informal agreement is established in order to maintain an equilibrium of capability(?) intelligence(?) or some other factor. Its specificity is unknown. The consensus parties are unknown. It is a McGuffin-style Design Fiction meant to signal that something happened and some new arrangement of some factors amongst associated or intermingled or interdependent or entangled parties, both human, non-human, and ex-human in order to maintain a balance of something. An ‘event horizon’.
An idiom that represents associated parties working towards a specified and agreed upon goal. We used to call them ‘companies’ or ‘the firm’. Due to an evolution of value creation semantics and the ontologies of intelligences able to create and contribute value, a new idiom — as well as the means and mechanics of value circulation & creation — arose. Value creators contribute to Entanglements. Entanglements may be managed in various unspecified ways. Distributed value creation is normal and contributions can be associated with many entanglements. Entanglements can consist of many associated parties which they themselves might be considered part of or a singular entanglement. They circulate value, with contributors receiving value back based on their proportionality status and agreements. THe notion is meant to imply indirectly a web of associations that are not only mor exclusively hierarchical, nor necessarily a linear chain semantically or in practice. perhaps a kind of more fractal configuration of associations and value circulation that is able to comprehend that there are no ‘externalities’ in practice.
A model in which workers, including digital twins, participate in multiple companies, balancing autonomy and project-based collaboration across industries. An evolution of the ‘Fractional C-Level’ rage of the Silicon Valley Nexus during the so-called ‘Value Confliction Period’ in the mid-2020s and prior to the Halifax Manifesto had adjusted doctrine towards the contemporary value creation ontologies. At the time of the Confliction, it was deemed necessary to appear as if one is still consistent in work, when even previously prestige executive roles, CEO, CTO, CMO, COO, CIO and the like had denominated downward in value to became freelance, partial, ‘gig’ labor. ‘Fractionalization’ roles became widespread and moved to ‘gig’ networking platforms like Fivvr, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and others that were popular during this period.