Challenge
20 years from today...
Hybrid working has become the norm. Many young professionals will work remotely from their bedrooms with smart glasses. Remote working still leads to lack of motivation, distractions, and potentially loneliness. With immersive tech like smart glasses, workers will find it even harder than today to disengage from work when they are at home.
Approach
“How might we reconstruct a better work-life balance for young professionals staying in co-living homes, in order to strengthen their wellbeing?”
Our team, Realspace, proposes a solution to engage users with remote working and create a boundary between work and personal life to improve work-life balance.
To design for a future product, our team employed various future scoping techniques and present day testing methods to validate our design decisions.
Solution
Realspace consists of a section of co-living buildings being transformed into new, dynamic workspaces. The space will consist of multiple soundproof workstations. Collaborative working experiences nearly identical to working in-person are provided using tech such as light field holograms, volumetric displays, spatial audio, radar sensing, and camera 3D mapping.
STEEP Scope Wheel
Using the wheel, we summarized signals, trends, and drivers related to the future of work and leisure. We identified five sub categories and conducted further research to determine the impact of these trends.
Proposed Product Service System
Occupying floors within co-living buildings, these spaces consists of multiple workstations and communal areas. The PSS will encourage users to work outside their home and create a new way of working which builds digital and spatial boundaries between work and personal life.
Testing and Development Methodology
Testing was done to evaluate the technical feasibility of the PSS and its ability to meet the design objectives. Methods such as lo-fi demonstrator models, expert interviews, user interviews, and secondary research were employed.
Research into technology feasibility can be found in the full report.
Developed Realspace Workstation
Technologies such as light field holograms, volumetric displays, spatial audio, radar sending, and 3D camera mapping will be used to engage users in both individual and collaborative work.
