With advances in technology and the implementation of it the daily lives of humans today, we observe a change in all our lifestyles. We are slowly moving out of the lifestyle set for us during the industrial revolution and into a lifestyle influenced by the arriving Sustainocene where democracy becomes a stronger concept in practice by the day in the globalised world. The 9 to 5 routine of work is giving way to a system that lets humans live life in a more flexible manner especially in countries where a 9 to 5 job can involve a lot of overtime work. However, how beneficial would innovation towards such a system be in improving people’s lifestyles as a whole? Would people stop getting over worked? Would they not be treated like commodities of a company when hierarchy in workspaces becoming more horizontal than vertical? Individual talents would have more value in a horizontal hierarchical system but how competitive would that make the work environment? How does that affect a human being in 2027?

In this design fiction ‘work?’, a vision of how co-working spaces would be the future of work lifestyle in cities is explored, in this case the city of Bengaluru, Karnataka. The fiction depicts how ‘NUMA’ (the site of inspiration for this fiction) would adopt various forms of technology and work ethics to keep their customers motivated and efficient at their work like a brain gym, a sleeping pod room that also acts like a virtual reality social media interface while a person is asleep, cleaning bots that double up as surveillance bots and so on. Work? explores the duality of dystopia and utopia in how the people working from NUMA in 2027 would be impacted by these technologies.