This story comes to us from Radha Mistry who is a Story Maker on our Corporate Strategy team. She and other team members (including a summer intern) considered how Autodesk customers will work in the distant future.
This summer Jessy Escobedo joined our Corporate Strategy team from the Art Center College of Design where she is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts in Media Design. Jessy’s thesis work proposes a new community development approach that uses machine learning/artificial intelligence to digitally incorporate communities of gentrifying neighborhoods in the planning process and forecast possible future scenarios of neighborhood change impacted by emerging technologies.
The Future of Work/Worldbuilding project explores how automation will shape the future (2030) landscape of our customer’s jobs, industries, and the nature of their work. Worldbuilding can be described as social constructivism and systemic design for storytelling. The greater aim of this effort is to ensure that Autodesk's perspective on the future of work is made as relevant and tangible as possible. Employing foresight tools and techniques, Jessy and our team have run workshops internally and externally, conducted interviews, and researched other reports, books, articles out in the market.
The insights generated from the research have been pulled into four finely textured scenarios depicting what the future of work might look like for Autodesk customers in the future, and what future jobs might exist in this future world:
- Winter — “Metropolis in Transit: Is a Win for the City a Win for All?”
- Spring — “From Robot Trainer to Small Town Mayor: How One Woman Led Industry 4.0 in Her Hometown”
- Summer — “Micro-factories as First Responders: How an Accidental Industrial Designer Shipped a Boat to Save His Island”
- Fall — “Rapid Recovery: How Connected Citizens and Thoughtful Technologies Built a New Future for this Hilltop Village”
The four scenarios help to tangibly demonstrate how humans and machines can partner to achieve more than either could alone. These scenarios have allowed our team to prototype possible and preferable futures in a safe space, in much the same way as Autodesk product teams prototype products and applications. The concepts of this project will continue to inform the way we deliver Autodesk’s vision for the future of work.
Thanks, Radha.
Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Forecasting the future of work through storytelling is a way to guide product teams who make the solutions for the customers who make the world.
Storytelling is alive in the lab.
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