Designing at Knee Level
46: No Sweat
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This issue of Harvard Design Magazine is about the design of work and the work of design. “No Sweat” challenges designers to speculate on the spaces of work in an accelerated future, and to imagine a world in which a novel ethics of labor can emerge. What scenarios and spaces can we imagine for the next generation of work? How can we anticipate and formulate work environments and experiences that are productive, humane, and ecologically responsible?
From corner office to kitchen sink, from building site to factory floor, from cubicle to car to coffee shop, work shapes our lives and physical world. Whether we produce objects, generate ideas, manage processes, or perform services, work is a hybrid of dedication and alienation, power and oppression. As work spaces morph to integrate machines that mimic, assist, or complement human abilities, the way we perform work, and the way we feel about it, change too.
To work (to put forth effort) and the work (that effort, or the result it generates) are sources of pride and shame, fulfillment and drudgery. As many jobs become obsolete, and as populations are displaced under the pressures of climate change and political turmoil, the boundaries of the workplace are shifting in space and time. Though some claim that a world without work is on the horizon, “labor-saving” innovations are enmeshed with human exploitation, and housework and care work remain at the crux of persistent inequalities.
Paradoxically, the more that work, as we once understood it, appears to be receding, the more omnipresent and ambiguous it becomes. The workplace is everywhere—or is it nowhere?
Articles
Table of Contents
Editors' Letter
Labor Pains
Jennifer Sigler
Column
A Small Key, Rotating Along Its Axis
Georgina Voss
Community and the Disavowed Labor of “Participation”
Andrew Herscher
Crisis of Work
Diann Bauer
Expulsion as Liberal Democratic Architecture
Gabrielle E. Clark
Life, Autocompleted
John May
Notes on Eye Tracking
Jonathan Crary
Porn, Work, Place: Beyond the (Set) Shop Floor
Heather Berg
The Business of Pleasure at the Berrics
Jonathan Olivares
The Inches
adrienne maree brown
Essay
Agricultural Platforms
Grace Abou Jaoude, Marten Kuijpers, Victor Muñoz Sanz
Almost a City: The Gaeseong Industrial District
Doojin Hwang
Alone like the Horn of a Rhino: Reproduction, Affective Labor, and the Contemporary Boarding House in South Korea
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
Labor and Work in Architecture
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Planetary Mine as an Archaeology of Labor Futures
Martín Arboleda
Refusal after Refusal
Adjustments Agency
Returns on the City: Detroit and the Design of Late Fordism
Douglas Spencer
The Home at Work: A Genealogy of Housing for the Laboring Classes
Dogma
The Incorporation of Dissent: Bürolandschaft’s Legacy
Andreas Rumpfhuber
The Incubator Incubator, the Administration of Leaky Bodies, and Other Labor Pains
feminist architecture collaborative
The Missing Unions of Architectural Labor
Peggy Deamer
Work as the Struggle against Entropy in the Anthropocene
Bernard Stiegler
Worlds without Work: From Homo Ludens to UBI Urbanism
Niklas Maak
Interview
Designing at Knee Level
Greg Lynn, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Mariana Ibañez
Picketing and Pruning
Dolores Huerta, Irene Figueroa-Ortiz
Pretending to Work
Benedict Clouette, David Graeber
Special
To Manifest
Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative
Artifact
A Fine Mess
Miya Tokumitsu
Belief and Baked Earth
Laurie Parsons
Cards on Cords
Emily King
End of the Line?
Justin D. Stern
Kitchens for Wages
Anna Puigjaner
Missed Connections in Bogotá, or Domestic Workers’ Commutes
Valentina Montoya Robledo
Model Building
Reto Geiser
No Free Rides
Alice Bucknell
On the Road to Dagenham
Brendan Cormier
Other Coworkers: Animals in the Workplace
Ned Dodington
Renewing the Model Factory
Nina Rappaport
The New Opacity
J. Frano Violich
Willie Wiredhand: Personal Electrical Assistant
Abby Spinak
Insert
Concrete as Weapon
Sérgio Ferro with Silke Kapp, Katie Lloyd Thomas, and João Marcos de Almeida Lopes
Plus
“If You Don’t Build Anything, You Don’t Exist”: Cementing the Future of Africatown in Seattle
Sara Zewde
Around the World in Six Coworking Spaces
Alessandra Ponte, Ana Rascovsky, Fig Projects, Merve Bedir, Sean O'Toole, Shumi Bose
Labor Utopia Post-Occupation
Florian Idenburg, Iwan Baan
Recasting Figures: Choreographies of Maintenance
Hilary Sample
Rereading Studs Terkel’s Working (1972)
Saima Akhtar
Colophon
Editor in Chief
Jennifer Sigler
Deputy Editor
Leah Whitman-Salkin
Production Manager
Meghan Ryan Sandberg
Creative Direction & Design
Jiminie Ha & Immanuel Yang
With Projects, Inc.
Editorial Board
Eve Blau, Neil Brenner, Toni Griffin, Mark Lee, Jeffrey Schnapp, Abby Spinak
Editorial Contributors
FIG Projects
Copyeditors
Olivia Casa, Elizabeth Kugler
Proofreader
Rebecca McNamara
Interns
Michelle Benoit, Gina Ciancone, Linda Just
Printer
AS Printon Trükikoda, Tallinn, Estonia