The result of a collaboration between Arizona State University’s (my alma mater by the way) Center for Nanotechnology in Society and The Design School at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Phoenix, AZ is exploring how life in the Valley may look, decades from now.
Darren Petricci, achitect and professor in the Design School, and Rider Foley, postdoctoral scholar with the Nanotech Center, shared four, plausible, day-in-the-life stories of a future city based on available and emerging technology. Those 4 stories were consolidated by design students who further developed two scenarios that blend the tech with the needs of the culture, aethetic influences, and real world needs to create environments not at all unlike those we aspire to help develop in making life work: environments that blur the line between life in work recognizing that entrepreneurs, mobile professionals, and indeed, the workforce of the future, will blur the lines themselves.
Instead of encouraging audiences to choose one scenario over the other, their goal is to encourage everyone to appreciate how your decisions today influence the future of your city.
Intruiging is the scenario that posits that large corporations, the very campus environments from which many professionals are fleeing, could evolve into sustainably run developments were not just employees both work and live but non-employees have access to spend time, work, and collaborate.
The vision is not far from that being fostered throughout the country today in coworking; open, accessible work environments enabling employees and professionals from all walks of life to work along side one another, fostering collaboration both in their work but also in the consumption of office space.
