Wearable Workforce is a project series exploring the dynamics among work clothes, our body and work culture. Through a range of experimental prototyping, the project reflects on the shifting landscape of work and leisure, which is becoming more and more relevant as the pandemic prompts us to challenge our typical workforce pattern. The designed wearables pose new interaction with the body, raising questions as much as responding to them.
Wearable Workforce - Commuter
The first prototype investigates different body postures under the context of work and leisure. Why is office clothes often a constraint to the body? How do people still commute throughout the border of work when they work from home? This work clothes concept pulls the body into certain posture of working through the installation of elastic rope. It delivers a physical commute for remote workers and directs attention to the overlooked office labor.
Wearable Workforce - Self-manager
What is the relationship between comfort and productivity? Informed by previous exploration on constraint body condition, the inflatable prototype goes to the opposite and looks at ways to support the body. Diving deep into the context of working from home, the lack of a central force of surveillance marks an interesting dynamic with comfort and productivity. Surveillance strikes the balance of appropriate comfort, which then leads to the highest productivity.
Breath was used as an agency of self-management to inflate the cushion attached to the clothes. The wearable communicates the concept of self-administered comfort, which manifests the transition of management responsibility from organization to individuals.
Wearable Workforce - Itinerants
Our current office landscape struggles to capture the gradual shift of tool, workflow, lifestyle and ideology we’re adopting.
< Wearable Workforce: Itinerants> arises under such background.
Itinerants are a group of knowledge workers who abandon their physical office space. Instead, they roam around the city visiting facilities like café, gym, park, restaurant with flexible working schedule. Knowing what they only need is their laptop, they push it to the extreme and design their wearable, micro-office by reconfiguring keyboard, mouse, display, speaker and system unit into extension of work clothes. They work anywhere in the city, even places without chair or desk. They’re radical pioneers of a new, highly mobile, fluid and energetic work culture, challenging presentable image of work clothes and bodily relation to digital productivity tools.
Why sitting still at the same spot all day long when all you need is your laptop? What would a micro office with high agility look like? Why can’t we just work around our neighbourhood? What if our physical office dissolves into the city? The fictional prop is designed to communicate this alternative lifestyle as a tangible vision toward a plausible future, as it helps us speculate on the work culture and labor of the post-pandemic era.
