The description of each work package can be found by clicking the images.
Work Package 1:
Exploration of future digitalized work and its impacts on work settings
Work Package 2:
New Spatial and land-use concepts for digital working futures
Work Package 3:
Environmental and health impacts of digital work futures
Work Package 4:
Competence building with future strategies, policies,
regulations and management practices
The spatial solutions will impact the performance and wellbeing of workers, but have also significant direct and indirect environmental impacts as it influences how we e.g. use spaces – live, work, commute, consume, and spend leisure time. WP1 aims to explore futures of work and to redefine the changing modes of work and its direct and indirect impacts by 2035 in the context of the whole of society transformation. Digital meanings society is perceived here as a conceptual framework. First, the possible prospects and shifts of future work are approached by viewing the digital and societal transformation simultaneously and understanding future work as part of it. Various paradoxes concerning the futures of work are addressed. Then, the primary, secondary and tertiary impacts of these possible prospects and shifts related to remote work settings are identified (including homes, workplaces and third places). Such impacts are analyzed based on their content (political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal dimensions = PESTLE). These tasks draw on a literature review, several interviews, delphi study, workspace cases (especially co-working spaces), and futures cliniques. A stakeholder’s point of view (employee, employer, society, public sector) will be highlighted in different time spans until 2035.
Work Package Leader: Sirkka Heinonen/UTU.
WP2 is associated with the Sustainable Housing Design research group ASUTUT from Tampere University. The aim of our work package is to investigate the social and spatial implications for working futures and to propose and design novel spatial and land-use concepts focusing on work conducted predominantly at and from home and adjacent living environments, recognising and responding to multiple social, environmental, and climatic crises and challenges that enable or disable new working futures for a diversity of people.
Throughout our investigation, we will:
Work Package Leader: Sofie Pelsmakers/TAU
Remote working will have implications for how we use energy, where we spend our time, and the environmental hazards such as air pollution that we produce and are exposed to. WP3 aims to understand these energy, environment, and health implications of remote working. This will be done by reviewing and examining the evidence on how things may change under different scenarios, for example using source apportionment data and evidence from the Covid lockdowns. This will be linked into a systems model, where different scenarios can be tested, and the resulting changes to energy, emissions, and behaviors used to estimate health and greenhouse gas emission consequences.
Work Package Leader: Jonathon Taylor/TAU
WP4 combines the findings of the previous WPs. There will be a close collaboration with stakeholders (urban planners, architects, office space managers and owners, developers). The digital sustainable future work settings are assessed, refined, and redefined with an aim to explore what kind of policies, regulations and management practices, and novel practices are needed and what novel business opportunities could emerge from the double twin transition and the systemic change towards winning future work settings. This is done by analyzing how different corporations view the transformation of work and it relates to future remote work settings. Together with stakeholders WP4 aims to understand possible barriers such as social and organizational issues as well as possibilities to achieve sustainable work settings.
Work Package Leader: Saija Toivonen/Aalto