How the meaning of time questions our work places?

HOW THE MEANING OF TIME QUESTIONS OUR WORK PLACES

ENGLISH ESSAY

LAURIE CROSNIER

2How the meaning of time questions our work places ?


1. The work-life balanceThe social acceleration of timeWays of living, ways of working

2. Third places might be your answerBeyond the business worldDestination «Third Island»Workshop and prototype for «The Beehive»

Bibliography

Summary

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06 The work-life balance

1. THE WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Nearly two thousand five hundred years ago, Aristotle stated that, “time is the most unknown of all unknown things”, and ar-guably not much has changed since then.

The word “time” comes from Proto-Germanic timon which

means “cut up, divide”. It also comes from the Latin tempus which means “fraction of duration”. People have thought time as a shape to be designed. Even if time is an abstract notion, men tend to control it in materializing it. Science and technological progress made it possible to invent devices to measure time. From this point onwards, mankind clearly regarded time as a scarce re-source which needs to be ruled for optimal efficiency.

As a matter of fact, time takes a specific meaning in the context of our contemporary society as an experience, a norm, a value. Time management, the process of planning and organizing tasks or events, is of prime importance in today’s business world.

THE SOCIAL ACCELERATION OF TIME


Since the 20th century, the world has literally evolved thanks to inventions like boats, railways, trains, cars, planes. Hartmut Rosa, a German philosopher, analyses the meaning of moderni-zation. According to him, it is about “setting the world in motion literally”, bringing things into movement as well as changing and “reshaping all the physical surrounding.” It also concerns ideas and communication, images and data around the world.

Florian Opitz, a German film-director, analysed the speeding up of our lives. He realized the feeling of frustration was the only thing that could sum up his connection with time. He tried to face the paradox of technologies “the more time we save, the less time we have.” Just like Florian Opitz, we all feel being stuck into a so-cial acceleration, which is frustrating. The increase of technical acceleration and the increase of the rate of change cause a social acceleration. What is the core of such acceleration?

“It is not only human desires alone, said Hartmut Rosa, it is more the logic and the form of modern society that drives this acce-leration” as a capitalist society can only reproduce itself through growth, speeding up and innovation. It seems to be a systemic necessity. For example, why is money attractive to most of us? Because money gives us a greater grasp over the world. It in-creases the quality of life, just like a smartphone literally brings the world into our pockets.

Karlheinz Geißler, professor at Bundeswehr University in Mu-nich, states we do not lack time but we have way too many things to do. Biological time is set and can not be stretched, days are twenty-four hours long, there are always four seasons a year. On the other hand technological progress and the rate of machines have turned our rhythm upside down and forced to be available anytime and to catch up with the speed of production. This time lag causes new social illnesses, like burn-outs linked to a deep feeling of pain at work.

Alex Ründe, a German journalist, refrained from using digi-tal tools for six months. In a similar approach, Rudölf Wötzel, a former “business shark” resigned in the middle of his career trying to catch up with his time and to be reunited with nature, slowness and serenity.

In fact, I wonder what the alternatives are to modify our way of life and work. During my research on the acceleration of time, I came across the notion of slowness and what is called the Slow Movement.

Carl Honore, the leader of this movement, published in 2013 the best-seller The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World. The call to slow down is not that new. It came up at the same time as the industrial revolution in the 19th century. The specific term of slow as an icon of a counter-culture started at the end of the 80’s with the Slow-Food Move-ment. Today, it is all about slowness, not only food.

“If I have learned anything over the past year, it is that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to promote it really fast,” Carl Honore explained.

In fact, the Slow Movement is meant to fight exclusion and des-truction caused by speed rather than slowing down. Carl Honore values a good work over a fast one, the quality of it over its quantity.

Something astonishing about working is that it has always had a bad reputation. Working seems to be incompatible with any kind of happiness. Such was the feeling shared by Greek philosophers like Aristotle but also by people since the industrial revolution.

Yet, nowadays we are told that working should be the one thing that gives meaning to our life which is what I felt during my latest internship in a communication agency. Indeed, I could clearly experiment the link between the partition of working hours and the cultural approach of time. The connection to time is a strong preoccupation which is a decisive factor in a profes-sional activity. As a designer-to-be, I am engaged in a field that involves creation and conception, my work often takes over my leisure time. So how can I deal with my work-time balance in a better way? What are the options offered from now on ?

WAYS OF LIVING, WAYS OF WORKING


Alexis Lecointe, a former engineer, came up with a concept that could change our relationship with our jobs. He is leading a project called “Creation for a basic income”. It would be a new eco-nomic step proposing an income separated from our jobs, which would be concurrently, unconditional, universal and personal. The concept of working could change if we could only care for the things we can do, the people we can help at work. The difference between someone who forces himself to work and someone who chooses what to work on then becomes very clear. According to André Gorz, a philosopher and journalist, people have turned their backs on to their jobs. They no longer want to identify with their jobs. All they want is their jobs to be interesting and meaningful. They all wish to be involved and to be socially useful. If it is not the case, a job is only a source of income, it is one’s bread and butter. In Alexis Lecointe’s opinion, a basic income which leaves us a free choice of activity allows us to have more “energy-time”.

“Every idea, every utopia can come true, as long as there are enough people to believe in it,” he says.

Beyond the political and economic aspects of the link between the concepts of time and work, I studied the way companies are managed.

According to Jason Fried, an American software entrepreneur, work cannot be done at the office. When you are an employee in a company, people expect you to do a great job at the office. In order to keep you coming every morning, the place is filled with desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, there are resting rooms where you can have coffee for example. However when people are asked where they want to go when they need to get something done, no one answers the office. They rather think of a specific location - the kitchen, an extra-room in the house, a moving object like a train, a plane or a car or a specific time - late at night or early in the morning. Jason Fried denounced the lack of quietness at the office, especially in the open-space offices. People need long stretches, uninterrupted time to get something done while employees are constantly interrupted at the office by meetings, calls and conversations. Jason Fried made a comparison

between work and sleep. Both cannot be efficient if interrupted. Instead a full day at work, employees deal with moments of work which need to be completed during their leisure time.

Stefan Sagemeister, an Austrian graphic designer, also insists on the real need to have time off. He denies the idea which makes people think designers are “light switch” creative.

“We designers need ample creative time and space to detach ourselves from their existing notions of good to discover spaces where we can rejuvenate the right side of our brains.”

In one of his conferences, he quotes a fellow TEDster, Jonathan Haidt, who divided his work into three different levels :

“At first, I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. The second case, in a career, I’m definitely more engaged. But at the same time, there will be pe-riods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn’t be financially compensated for it.”

As for him, Stefan Sagemeister aims at a “dream job”.

Nigel Marsh qualifies himself as “a classic corporate warrior”, he ate, drank too much, worked too hard and neglected his fa-mily. Once he turned 40, he decided to turn a page over and try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So he stepped back from the workforce, and took a sabbatical year to spend more time at home. “All I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I did not have any work” he said in his TED conference.

Seven years of struggling, studying and writing about work-life


balance, Nigel Marsh suggested that it is up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the kind of lives we want to lead. Waiting for governments and corporations to solve this issue for us is pointless. What’s more, we have to realize that we can not do everything we would like to in one day.

“We need to stretch the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to stretch it without falling into the trap of the - I’ll have a life when I retire, when my kids leave home, when my wife sue for divorce. My health is failing. I’ve got no mates or interests left.”

Being better-balanced does not mean a radical transformation of our lives. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your lives. It would even transform the society at large.

14Third places might be the answer

2. THIRD PLACES MIGHTBE THE ANSWER

Eventually, I decided to look for answers to my questions beyond the business world. According to Bernard Stiegler, a French philosopher, half of our jobs will probably disappear in about thirty years. It has already started.

Let’s take Ford for example. In 1929 the firm hired 130 000 people, nowadays Tesla Motors, the most advanced car manufac-turer hires 6000 people and most of them are engineers. Robots and algorithms are replacing us step by step, doing our painful jobs in our place. Also the ICTs – information and communication technology – gave users the possibily to rethink their work-life balance and mostly the places concerned. They give us the op-portunity to work at home and develop teleworking. However, Coworkers, teleworkers and other work-at-home professionals soon started to feel lonely and searched for new places to work with others. What was called “Third Places” emerged and became a real ecosystem where workers created, produced and inovated. Ray Oldenburg, an American urban sociologist, explains in his book The Great, Good Place, the importance of informal public gathering places for a functioning civil society, democracy, and civic engagement.

In this context where jobs suffer economic and social changes, I questioned the designer’s status. If designers usually work in an agency where they are related to clients, what part can they play in a coworking space? Changing place allows workers to change their way of working beyond the lines drawn by the job and our society. A new way of working that involves a shared working environment, often an open-space. Unlike in a typical office en-vironment, the aim of those “Third Places” is not to hire people in an organization but to host independent contractors and offer them a social gathering place.

According to Yoann Duriaux, an independent contractor, a “Third Place” is a place to meet, exchange and share knowlegde

BEYOND THE BUSINESS WORLD

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and practice. It is also made of time frames – presentation, obser-vation, concentration, debate and chats with a cup of coffee or a drink – based on sharing and developing ideas, projects.

And that is why designers have a main role in those places. Indeed, they are called upon to become the designers and guides inside the shared-system. Yoann Duriaux called them “social archi-tects”. In his opinion, designers cannot innovate without working with users, actors of a new participative society.

In order to translate the concept of “Third Places” visually, I first designed an infographic that explains the needs for such places. I used the metaphor of an original island which was divided into two blocks by a violent earthquake giving birth to “Work Island” and “Home Island”. Through a short storytelling, the workers who were tired of spending too much time on “Work Island” had a trip on a big “participative boat” to the “Third Island” where people started coworking.

DESTINATION “THIRD ISLAND“

For my project, I decided to look for “Third Places” in Mar-seille. I got in touch with an association called “The Beehive” and met Fanny Havas who organizes almost everything that happens there. In fact, her function is close to that of a housekeeper, a job that is gaining an important position in a participative society.

Third places might be the answer

Like designers, she guides workers throught “The Beehive” to get the benefits of coworking. She also deals with the paperwork, arrangements, materials, the come and go of workers and inter-communication. Indeed, she is the link between all the coworkers and I started to think of her as a tool that could be physical and would translate the possible relation or collaboration between coworkers who do not know one another yet.

I first identified all the tools that help us get organized in everyday life. With flashy colors, short size post-it notes came first. Magnetic boards and blackboards were also quite popular. At work or at home, we all need those kinds of media to write down lists, make links or remind us of important events. Codes of colors or shapes make it easier to see clearly the different characteristics and draw our attention on the most important pieces of information.

At “The Beehive”, Fanny already had several activities to col-lect ideas and requests from the coworkers, like a potluck lunch every Thursday. During those lunches, she rings a bell to get eve-ryone’s attention and someone stands up and talks about any-thing. Thoses activities are made to create some social links and professional connections. However, they also show the hindrance and limits of collaboration. They share some informations but the impact is limited.


REFERENCES

Created by Vitamins Design, The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner that the team invented for their studio. It’s made entirely of Lego. They used Lego to visualise complex logistics systems in a simple and tangible way, Vitamins’ solution allows you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online, digital calendar.

REFERENCES

Textile designer Ellen Van Dusen of DUSEN DUSEN also made an «expressive wall» with Visual Magnetics to realize three interactive spaces which animated childhood sticker book memories into a playground for grown-ups.

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I started to prototype a tool to be able to mutualize the skills and needs of every coworker. The idea was to propose a physical object to display workers’ profiles, their projects and the weekly schedule at “The Beehive”. Three zones for a better legibility are divided in three magnetic boards. The main issue was to find the right way to collect information about the coworkers such as their skills and qualifications, their status, when they arrived at the Beehive, where they had worked before, what motivated them to work at the Beehive ? What led them to coworking ?

Fanny really insisted on the fact that the tool had to be parti-cipative, that it had to be co-created by the coworkers. So we or-ganized a workshop where all the workers had to work in pairs. Then I proposed to them some cards with several primary forms like a square, a triangle, a circle. Each form was related to a notion such as their job, their project, a skill or a need. Those forms were actually templates. Each worker filled in the card of his partner, drawing what came to their minds according to the form and the notion mentioned on the card. The aim of the workshop was to make workers create a content for each other to get to know each other. I also proposed a photoshooting.

After the workshop, I collected their productions and drew them on Illustrator and superimposed them on the photographs. With the designs created by the workers for workers, the aim of my project was to make the specificities clearly readable and un-derstandable at first glance. The “identity media” were magnetized and put on a blackboard in the hall of “The Beehive”.

After graduating, I wish to engage in a civic service at “The Beehive” to continue my work with the coworkers and push foward ways to create more social links and collaborations between the workers.

As a graphic designer, I am also curious to find out how the “Third Places” will evolve in the future and I do wish to take part in their evolution.

WORK SHOP AND PROTOTYPE FOR «THE BEEHIVE»

Third places might be the answer

by

for workers

workers

Supports for the workshop «by the workers, for the workers», performing at «The Beehive».

1. needs2. statuts3. future4. skills5. breaks6. project7. tools and technics8. coworking9. presence

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

WORKSHOP

22Third places might be the answer

«The Beehive» opened in 2013 in Marseille in a place of 400 square metres with shared spaces and work places for two to eight months residency.

PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHIES

PROTOTYPE

24 Bibliography

BibliographyLANTENOIS Annick, Le vertige du funambule - Le design graphique entre économie et morale,

Paris, ed. B42, 2010, 88 p. PERRY John, The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to

Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing, 2012.RIFKIN Jérémy, The Third Industrial Revolution, 2013.ROSA Hartmut, Social Acceleration, a New Theory of

Modernity, 2015, translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys.

Videography

DURIAUX Yoann, what is a Third Place? May 2015 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11WsmhzNvE

FRIED Jason, Why work doesn’t happen at work, October 2010, TED conference : http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work

HARTMUT Rosa, Why are we stuck behind the social acceleration? March 2015, TED conference : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG9OFGId3A

HONNORÉ Carl, In praise of slowness, June 2005, TED conference : https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness

LECOINTE Alexis, Extract from «Free work, basic income and other revolutions», April 2014 : https://vimeo.com/93492768

MARSH Nigel, How to make work-life balance work, May 2010, TED conference : http://www.ted.com/talks/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work

OPITZ Florian, In search of lost time, 2011, ARTE

SAGMEISTER Stefan, The power of time off, February 2014, TED conference : http://www.ted.com/talks/

26 Bibliography

stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off?language=frSTIEGLER Bernard «L’automatisation et

la fin de l’emploi», June 2014 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UfGO2Gf7LM

TRACKS documentary, «Tracks is resigning», April 2015 : http://tracks.arte.tv/fr/emission/2015-05-02

Websites

la-ruche.net/la-ruche-marseille.org/wikipédia.frarsindustrialis.orgcreations-revenudebase.orghuffingtonpost.frlittre.orgtrop-libre.frmovilab.orgzones-mutantes.com

28 Thanks

Special thanks to Christine Orsola.

Typographies : Cambria drawed by Jelle Bosma, Steve Matteson et Robin Nicholas in 2004Palatino by Herman Zapf, 1950Bureau grotesque by David Berlow, 1989-93

Paper :Clairefontaine Dune 100 gr.Clairefontaine Pollen 120 gr.Clairefontaine blanc 224 gr.

Edition : format 160x240 mmprinted in 2 copiesJune 2015

numbers of Signs :16 480 signs


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How the meaning of time questions our work places?