Futures of Digital Work

Over the past years, a range of digital technologies have made an impact on work across sectors and industries. Yet, the recent release of ChatGPT, Midjourney and related Artificial Intelligence-infused platforms have opened up for new opportunities, challenges and a boom in postulations about how digital tools will impact the future of how work is organised and carried out.

In this Collaborative Foresight cycle, together with Malmö University, we’ll gather a diverse group of experts and community members to examine futures of work. Together, we’ll ask how AI-infused systems and other evolving and emerging technologies will shape where, how and why we work. We are particularly interested in investigating developments in sectors that are actively creating and adopting new tools, methods, and models of work, as we believe that these are places where future digital work practices for a broad spectrum of industries will emerge.

In this foresight cycle, we’ll explore questions, such as:

• How do we adopt and adapt evolving AI-infused platforms into our work? How do we anticipate and imagine work to transform as a result?
• What new professional roles, tasks and routines might surface?
• How might the competencies and knowledge of digital professionals change?
• What novel ways of collaborating with human- and non-human agents might emerge?
• How might work be distributed over time and space following digital advances and innovations?

This Collaborative Foresight cycle is hosted in partnership with Malmö University as part of the Data Society research program. Malmö University researchers will study the Collaborative Foresight process as such and the knowledge created will inform their research on futures of digital work.

The cycle builds on our previous investigation in Futures of Creative Expression and our own experiences from running a place for work for eleven years.

As with each Collaborative Foresight cycle, a broad section of the community comes together in seminars and workshops to scan the signals and trends of today, imagine a spectrum of tomorrows, and examine the ethical implications of what we’ve imagined. Then from the vantage point of our co-created futures, we’ll unpack the relationships, skills, tools and strategies needed to respond to and harness emerging technology tools and platforms in our work.

Who can Collaborate: The future is plural! We invite interested and creative minds of all levels of experience to join us for this Collaborative Foresight cycle. We’re particularly interested in putting folks from the creative community, the business and tech spaces in the same room with academics, the public sector and people with lived experience-expertise. You could be a web developer, a communication professional, a researcher, an interaction designer, an artist, a HR professional, a community organiser or something else! People with direct experience developing and/or using machine learning, LLM and AI-tools and platforms are very welcome. At the same time, we believe that no one is an expert in what our futures hold, and the more diverse perspectives the better.

How we Share: We share the insights and ideas from each Collaborative Foresight cycle in a final seminar and a final book. We’ll summarize the futures we’ve co-created in community, offer up reflections and insights from core contributors, and invite the community to continue to discourse in our next cycles at our annual gathering, The Conference.

How to Collaborate:

• Core contributor: Dive deeply into this topic as a member of a core group of changemakers. Each cycle, we ask 15-20 members of our community to share their time and perspective in a total of six full- and half-day workshops on the cycle topic, guided by our Collaborative Foresight facilitators. You’ll gain the confidence, skills and a supportive network to bring futures-thinking and strategic foresight into your own practice.

• Community collaborator: Join our public workshops to contribute to compact explorations of digital work, as viewed through the lens of the future. As a community collaborator, you’ll gain new perspectives on the urgencies of the present and help scan for signals and trends. Bookmark this page and stay tuned for event updates.