Fairness and Elephants – New Things in the Tabakfabrik. Something is happening in the Tabakfabrik Linz. At the end of 2019, the redesigned club canteen opened. The „Charming Elephant“ approached the task as urban, chic, playful, health-conscious, and with a small ecological footprint. Tom Zuljevic-Salamon founded the first social enterprise in the Tabakfabrik. FairMarkt, an operation of the KoopArbeit cooperative, is the first local food supplier on the Tabakfabrik site. It offers a selected range of regional and fairly produced organic products: a small morning snack or daytime food, drinks, groceries, and cosmetic products. Under the motto „Designed by nature. Made by people. Inspired by tradition,“ FairMarkt focuses on authenticity, social commitment, and sustainability at events. FairMarkt also brings a touch of Brazil into the Tabakfabrik: ArteLaVista, an event series in a supermarket of a different kind, connects local cultures from Brazil with the European way of life and brings the Brazilian artistic world and its attitude to life closer. Fascinating handmade unique pieces were presented, all one of a kind and 100 percent socially fair, including natural jewelry made from the golden grass plant, which grows worldwide only in Brazil, and design objects made from recycled paper.
Social Design
Competitive Social Design – The Social Question of the Next Society – Louis Klein. We have become accustomed to addressing the social only where it visibly fails. We speak of social problems and think of poverty, illness, or violent protest. We regularly locate the social at the margins of society. Social questions are there, not here. Their answer can be delegated to the state or to civil society. We have forgotten how to think the social from the center of society. We still remember the human being as a social being, but immediately turn this thought into population theory. We recognize that human beings do not live alone but in community. We think of communities and immediately leap in our minds to large state models and social utopias. We regularly block our view of the decisive area in between: between the individual on one side and the state on the other. The emergent form of the social lies in the middle of lived practice, in the togetherness of many people.
Designing the New.
With Community Production, New Work advocates a new form of urban production as an alternative to globalized production and exploitative forms of work. Its strategy is to connect traditional craft with technological production methods from local fab labs, such as laser cutting or 3D printing. These „city factories“ are not meant only as a model for new forms of production in urban centers, but also as an experimental field for future forms of work that represent alternatives to today’s dominant gainful employment. The research questions around future work concern the potential of self-production, circular economy, and the use of creativity as a common good.
Community Formation. Collaboration and innovations for organizing it shape the lifestyle of an entire generation. In order to find forms of new collaboration, the framework in which the world of work is organized is increasingly changing. This is reflected not only in new spaces and changing infrastructure for work in large companies, but also in the new cultural techniques of diverse entrepreneurial ventures that are now increasing strongly, and no longer only in urban contexts. When knowledge via mobile internet is almost already integrated into the operating system of human beings, qualities other than merely possessing factual knowledge become far more important. Leadership competence, individuality, and a certain personal difference in style and method when solving tasks; recognizing patterns and possibilities in work; and, above all, a certain compatibility with chaos are already in high demand.
The Beginnings
The New Work Center caused quite a stir in Motor City. In the style of a visionary, Frithjof Bergmann sat in a US television studio in 1989 and predicted today’s calamities in the job system, along with a solution for making the transformation of work succeed.
The birth of New Work. The history of New Work begins in the early 1980s in Flint, one of the most important automotive cities in the United States. At that time, General Motors factories were facing a wave of layoffs. Frithjof Bergmann had already had a varied career: thanks to a scholarship from the Austrian embassy in the United States, the son of a pastor had come to America to study. After stints as a prizefighter, dockworker, and philosophy doctoral student at Princeton, he had landed at the University of Michigan, about 50 miles south of the General Motors plants in Flint.
Brave New Work. In his 1987 front-page article in the Detroit Free Press, „Brave New Work,“ James Ricci captures the optimistic spirit of New Work ideology in its historical dimensions: with the eyes of a philosopher, Frithjof Bergmann looks at the economic gloom over suffering Flint and sees the dawn of a new phase in human history. In the tradition of seers of the new light, he worked tirelessly to move Flintites, and with them all of industrial America, to look up from their despair and read the sky.
It all began in Flint. As a philosophy professor, Bergmann had already been working for some time on work and automation, writing books and a television series on the subject. Together with friends from business, unions, and politics, as he writes in his book „New Work, New Culture,“ he founded the first Center for New Work. The center’s first proposal to General Motors was this: instead of dismissing half the workers because of automation, making „half the city unemployed and the other half overworked,“ GM should risk a „horizontal cut“: everyone stays, but works only six months a year. During the other six months, Bergmann said, workers should come to the Center for New Work to find out what they „really, really want.“ The Center for New Work would then help them actually earn money with it.
Half the population of US cities is already marginalized today, living under intolerable conditions. From a social-philosophical perspective, the author questions the arbitrariness of the American concept of freedom. He criticizes an employment system that fails to integrate half the population. In models tested in practice in the United States, he develops alternatives for New Work that open the possibility of meaningful, self-determined activity for working people. The Flint model alternates six months of work in an automobile factory with six months of self-provisioning work.
In addition, from the beginning there was a clear awareness that a comprehensive and systematic revaluation of all aspects connected with the currently dominant conditions of work – with the „job system,“ as the New Work movement soon called it – was long overdue and urgently necessary. At the same time, it was clear that this intellectual enterprise would remain ineffective and lame if New Work did not create, alongside it, a series of pilot projects demonstrating application, through which both the correctness of our diagnostic analysis and its feasibility could be proven.
From the very beginning, the efforts undertaken now 36 years ago, which led to the founding of the Center for New Work in 1984 and later to the founding of further Centers for New Work in both the United States and Europe, and from which many related projects emerged, had not only an application-oriented and practical dimension but also a theoretical and philosophical one.
New Work Bauhaus
NEW WORK IN THE HISTORIC GROPIUS BUILDING. The first German employment office / Walter Gropius, Dessau, round building / 1928. One of the most exciting temporary projects was New Work Bauhaus in Dessau. In the Gropius building, the world’s first employment office from the Great Depression, projects were developed that rethought the handling of work, or „New Work.“ In the spirit of Bergmann’s New Work concept and vision, personnel and organizational development in a social enterprise was reorganized, creating a sustainable addiction-prevention system for vocational support for people dependent on alcohol.
In the New Work projects in Dessau and in the many other approaches spread across four continents, the issue is often that people regain new ground after years of dulling experiences with work. The central theme is education: education of the self in order to find out who one is and what one really, really wants, and education in the cultural techniques of a new life and work. For NANK it is especially important that the experiences are not only supervised, described, and evaluated by researchers, but that the people gaining new ground write about their projects themselves.
The unobstructed view into precarious working conditions in meaningless worlds of work, into deserted villages and small underserved towns that have become symbols of hopes stuck halfway, tells of people who have set out to improve the local situation in very practical ways. New Work supports people who recognize possibilities for design and change on their own initiative and make society themselves.
„My impatience is enormous,“ admits Babette Scurell, who is responsible for New Work at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The Bauhaus is committed to the principles of sustainable regional development and economic self-help. Asked about the rather sparse practical experience in New Work, she uses the image of a glass of water, half empty or half full. The Dessau coordinator wants to connect existing approaches in the region. Scurell points to the Creative Center Wolfen and the Initiative Circle Expo 2000 for Saxony-Anhalt. She attributes the particular resonance of Bergmann’s ideas in the eastern German states not only to high unemployment. The mentality of eastern Germans fits the concept: „Neighborhood help, the informal sector, and elements of subsistence economy already had high value in the GDR.“ „There is no royal road to New Work,“ Scurell also emphasizes. In the long term, it will matter whether Bergmann’s theses are implemented in companies. „Traditional union thinking revolves around the employed, not the unemployed.“ New Work approaches in companies could mean a gain in power for employee representatives: „Works councils would have to negotiate this with management, not the union.“
The exhibition StadtFabrik: New Work. New Design, as part of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2017, worked through three socially relevant themes for the future of work: new creative work and cross-disciplinary co-creativity, new social work including work for commons, and new sustainable work in the sense of circular economy and innovative use of urban resources.
StadtFabrik – New Work New Design
StadtFabrik is a real-time research laboratory for new creative-economy fields of work, focused on discovering and making visible future urban potentials in Vienna. In cooperation with the IDRV – Institute of Design Research Vienna and the Vienna Business Agency, pioneers of positive change acting in future-oriented ways were made visible and given a voice under the hashtag #wiegehtveränderung. The format focuses on networking and activating Vienna’s creative scene with itself, as well as on interdisciplinary exchange. The focus is less on merely depicting or presenting already completed and no longer accessible projects than on making visible strategies and tools that foster change. The important questions are: How can already tested strategies and projects be used for future interventions? What can we learn from them? How do we create a basis for participation and motivation among as many people as possible? And above all: how does change happen? These are the questions in the project continued after the exhibition.
Nordbretter – Inclusive Theater at Kiel Werftpark
Nordbretter began in 2003 under the name Inclusive Theater Kiel as a professionally led inclusive theater project for interested citizens with and without disabilities, in cooperation with Theater im Werftpark / Theater Kiel. The initial funding and sponsorship were taken over by organizations of disability associations. Since the first 2003-2004 season, the annually changing ensemble, in ongoing cooperation with Theater im Werftpark and under the direction of Raija Ehlers, has produced a new theater piece of its own every theater season. In 2016, the association Neue Arbeit – Neue Kultur Kiel e.V. took over sponsorship, and the city of Kiel decided to provide basic funding for the productions of the Inclusive Theater Kiel through the association as part of regular cultural funding. The renaming to nordbretter reflects both the persistent desire to keep exploring inclusive forms of theater work in the far north and the need for concision. With various productions, we have repeatedly been invited to inclusive theater festivals, guest performances in Germany, and also to a guest performance in Vaasa, Finland.
Social Design and New Urban Production Experiments
PARK Makes Space – a prototype for New Work. New Work and new social housing. The creation of new social quarters, the urban development process, and the functionality and diverse usability of new districts form the frame for the Park project’s engagement with new forms of living and co-living, optimized construction methods, new financing and land models, the search for suitable developers, and urban user groups. In 2017, the Vienna team researched and reflected with Park macht Platz on urban succession processes, mixed use, and the development of existing postwar neighborhoods. Learning from success and failure provides fertile ground for the experimental field and laboratory situation needed for creative solutions and the implementation of new paths. New social housing. More about the project: Park macht Platz
In the Green Market near Vienna’s main railway station, everything revolves around housing, working, and producing in mutation. NANK participated in the winning architecture competition and was able to convincingly show the jury how and where the old industrial model is transforming. With this neighborhood building and its transitional spaces between living and working, a concrete utopia emerged near Vienna Central Station, including the demand for open factories that provide production infrastructure for everyone. The building is, on one hand, a display with comprehensive information, and on the other hand a sphere where things become very practical. People work on machines to make things themselves, receive advice on new technologies, learn about sustainability strategies, and are supported in the longing to do what they really want.
Additive Manufacturing & Co.
Blockchain, AI, IoT, additive manufacturing, robotic assistants, shy tech, virtual factories, big data for us. All kinds of things around us have long since begun to communicate with one another without our intervention. This is not entirely new: for years, airplanes have flown much more safely with the help of machine-controlled security-by-design principles. But the extent of machine communication in everyday life has grown enormously. Physical and digital things are merging. This also has consequences for work. In robotics, the innovation cycle is now accelerating faster than in computers. Prostheses extend human beings, and human-machine interactions are becoming more diverse but also easier to manage. Connecting new action with good purpose is a hopeful trend: social innovation. But what can it mean for work?
It Is Not Enough to Design Only a Product. You Have to Design Its Life Cycle. What Happens Before, What Happens After?
More punk, less hell. How could work be designed so that it corresponds more directly to humanity? New Work has been working on this for more than 30 years. One experiment: the open-source shoe ORTHOPRADA. It is an example of how we may make our products in the future. If, instead of 0.005 percent of the things we need every day, we made just 5 percent ourselves in DIY, that would already be a huge step: a step toward less poverty, more prosperity, and a greener planet.
Almost one third of all surveyed product manufacturers do not know when they should invest in digital technology solutions for their companies, and they state that company leadership should lead the efforts to introduce smart manufacturing. According to a survey of small and medium-sized enterprises, one third of respondents say that one of the greatest challenges in implementing intelligent manufacturing solutions is finding qualified employees. According to Gartner, half of all companies assume that they lack sufficient artificial intelligence (AI) and data competence to generate business value by 2020.
Industry 4.0 and Mini-Factories
This is not a fantasy of the future. It is real and it is happening now. The renowned MIT in Boston offers a program and a degree in smart factory education because a large target group has been identified. This program includes many technical elements, but it develops and teaches cultural techniques for those who are new to intelligent manufacturing concepts. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is at the forefront of applied research and understands the factors that lead to successful implementation of intelligent technologies. From modeling to manufacturing systems to advanced data analysis, MIT draws on more than 100 years of collaboration between university and industry.
The Steyrer. Together with Automotive Solution, New Work New Culture built a production-ready prototype of an electric scooter from a box. With four reprintable main elements, the Steyrer can be rebuilt and assembled relatively easily in small mini-workshops. More about the projects
The Pre-Scripted World
The Gap Is the Work
The Frontier We Cannot See
When AI Judges: Who Still Learns How to Decide?
Truth Is Not Delivery: What Work Remains Valuable When AI Can Produce Any Output
Europe Is Fed Up. Catching Up Is Still Not a Strategy
The Golden Cage of Post-Work
If AI Serves the Customer but Compresses the Worker, Who Is Still Human?
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