Today’s discussions is a pivotal moment in our project’s development, marked by a passionate(heated actually, haha) debate over our new direction. Initially, I was really drawn(probably because I have experienced this and is really biased) to the theme of employee burnout as I have personally experienced it myself, struggling within a seemingly fun and stress free(company canteens, bars, swimming pool, pool tables etc.) yet ultimately draining corporate environments. I was advocating for a focus on the mental well-being of employees under the stress of burnout. Despite my inclination towards this topic, we as a group, led by insights from Louason and Nina, collectively decided to pursue another equally compelling topic – the ethical implications of technology replacing human labor, particularly in the hospitality sector within tech companies.
This new angle speculates into the future of work, where technological advancements may lead to further job displacement and increase the social class gap. Khyathi also added another angle to our discussion, pointing out that this evolution of technology, pushing out human workers, could erode interpersonal relationships within the society as it would cause people to spend less time interacting with other people. This is a perspective that I found debatable given the breadth of human connections and interactions beyond work and hospitality, for example, family and friends. Khyathi also highlighted to me that the progression of technology and the stress/anxiety caused by the fear of getting replaced will contribute to employee burnout, so we will still be able to cover some aspects of the burnout issue.
After we had finally set a theme, we started brainstorming ways we can present this. It quickly transformed into something like a creative workshop, which was really fun! We started fleshing out a fictional future workspace scenario set in a tech company’s canteen. We envisioned personas including the CEO, a Food Engineer Supervisor overseeing kitchen automation, a human Chef anxious about being replaced, and a Waiter who has already been substituted by serving machines. We also looked at roles of corporate workers at the tech company(sales, marketing, product designers, engineers etc) who contributes to the success of these automation technologies, which might eventually lead to their own job displacement. It’s cyclical and ironic, and we hope to be able to illustrate that in this narrative.
Today’s meeting session, while intense, showed a depth of engagement and diverse perspectives within our group, and also reminded me of the importance of compromise and collaboration in moving our project forward.
Next steps: deepen our research to substantiate our claims (or maybe prove ourselves wrong), also we’ve set the place we want to visit, Google Canteen, not sure if we can get access to it but I’m optimistic.