Future of Work 2025
Client Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH
Location Frankfurt a.M., DE
Area 406 m²
Function Innovation space at the consumer goods trade fair "ambiente" with event, exhibition and manufacturer areas
Year 2024-2025
Phases 1- 3, 5, 8
Team André Schmidt, Joris Fach
Text Joris Fach, André Schmidt
Photography
Future-of-Work 2025
This year's design of the Future-of-Work area spatializes the challenges of navigating a real-virtual working reality. In some places, duplication of exhibition products simulate their reality and their virtually reproduced image, in other places mirrors duplicate a single product. The distortion of realities is highlighted by mirror surfaces, the fleetingness of virtual spaces is represented by dissolving walls. Overall, the Future-of-Work area is trying to point out the new instabilities within work environments, in which much will be real, much virtual and most will probably be a combination of both.
Reality – Virtuality
The future of work has not only been marked by virtuality. Rather, with the increasing establishment of artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, a mutual dependence of reality and virtuality manifested itself, in which both worlds not only move towards each other, but merge more and more into each other. Orientation within this superimposed and thus more diffuse reality requires new skills. What is real or virtual, what is authentic or fake, what is of human or machine-made origin? Purposeful navigation of these multi-layered transitions requires increased sensitivity to sources and critical attention to every subtext of every communication. Only those who question, put themselves in a specific context and double-check origins independently can work successfully.
Human Knowledge - Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is questioning entrenched workflows. It performs and improves certain processes more or less independently, can make human activities obsolete, but also opens up entirely new fields of possibilities. The changes in collaborative mechanisms, but also in the working environment, inspire and unsettle in equal measure. Artificiality and reality must complement each other and fuse into a both-and-situation. Illusions become a constant companion of our Life and work-environment(s).The modern separation of home and office environments has become increasingly blurred in recent decades. This distorted image therefore exists not only due to the global covid pandemic. The fact that during the pandemic, living and working were condensed as a digital uniform mush at the kitchen table will, however, probably also be regarded in the future as a watershed moment, after which working looked different than before. The distinction between living and working is dissolving. The demarcation of office space within the workplace is also dissolving. Formerly clearly defined poles such as office space and meeting room are not abandoned, but they crystallize as fragments of a working environment that has a variety of equally important focal points. Entrance areas become lounges, the corridor is stocked with bar tables, kitchenettes expand into creative areas and meetings can take place (almost) anywhere.
