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nav kriti

aka new work

is a glimpse into the semblance of work inside the future society we have speculated.
Using the design fiction methodology, we forecasted preferred visions from the future of work through the lens of three members of the distributed community. 

In this society, the phenomenon of work has become fluid, professional boundaries have become grey. New means of earning livelihood has risen to help each citizen stay relevant for the socio-ecological order at different stages of their life.

Ra, 14yrs.

almora, uttarakhand.

A young girl is hiking up to a mountain meadow with her backpack. Once there, she sets up her transparent, dome-shaped work
studio. Ra (she/her) from the Pine society commune has turned fourteen years of age. Their commune is involved in creating bio-construction material out of pine needles. Her mother works at Pine society as a strategist for innovations. Her father is a community teacher of ethics.

Like others her age, Ra has chosen a present interest. For her it is transportation design; for her close friend it is food processing. Ra has found an apprenticeship position with a transportation pod designer based in New Delhi, who is referenced by the Child Friendly Workspaces Committee (CFWsC).

She decided to pursue this formal program. He sent her a curriculum of skills he wishes to teach her, along with a DIY work package designed by him. This package included kits for practicing foundational level transportation design as well as a blow-up 8ft by
10ft workshop structure.

Ra’s younger sister is 4 years old and has recently received her personal AI artefact in the form of a rattle from the CFWsC. The artefact will evolve through the course of her sister’s life- into a walker, a watch, a chair and such, while also learning and mapping her natural dispositions related to talent, temperament, and weaknesses. 

Ra thinks about how her sister’s work-learning path might unfold- at seven years old her sister might obsess over space. At ten, she might be actively learning technical and social community engagement from the communes Jugaad solutionist.

As she turned twelve, she might decide tolearn sound engineering and classical music virtually. Ra has understood how AI identified, mapped and exposed users to data so that individuals could build on their ideas.

4L3x aka Alex, 35yr.

bhubaneswar, orissa.

He identifies as transgender (he/him), lives in the sub-urban part of the city, in his ancestral home. His day starts early at 6am as a ‘Carbon Farmer’ to fulfill his mandate of the government’s environmental recovery plan. He has worked 2hours each weekday at his local work commune since the last 10 years.

After the fixed work, he works on his gig projects. He engages as a ‘Rejuvenation Architect’ from Mon-Thu and as a ‘Transgender Counsellor’ from Fri-Sun. In his free time, he also likes to write slam poetry in his
old school paper diary.

Gig projects are matched through a personalised encrypted talent cloud AI ( a web/virtual platform ), which anyone can buy a subscription at the end of their formal education. This talent cloud is populated by people transacting their skills & talent in exchange for blockchain-currency. Projects from across the world, from various organizations are available on the system. The interested job seekers apply & form teams to bid for the projects.

4L3x in his role of “Rejuvenation Architect”, develops frugal solutions for areas which are devastated by natural calamities. He works with a team of 11 people across the world on these projects to put back the life-systems of these ravaged habitats. As he requires special tools like Holo-tables for this, he takes a rental space in the communes vocation space.

For his gig of ‘Queer counselor’, 4L3x logs in to the VR space from his home. The counselee gets matched through a VR social network, where the both of their avatars interact with the multitude of virtual worlds to convey their emotions & thoughts. This work earns 4L3x social credits. That he redeems at his commune for subsidised social benefits at the government touchpoint center.

Mrityunjay, 52yr.

 jaipur, rajasthan.

As the last electric tram left the
“Paanchbatti” crossroads, a group of young men and women hurried towards the coffee house. It is now just a symbolic name associated with the place which once used to serve that
purpose. Today it’s a skill shop that houses one of the first bio printers in the city. Skill shops are community spaces where the citizen can access a catalog of skills and build a relationship with it in forms of
learning, teaching, practicing etc.

Mrityunjai is one of the pioneers in the community of makers, technologists and designers of the city and is also the founding member of our Paanchbatti Skill Shop. He was once a freelance machine enabler and was associated with fabricators and designers as a soft-tech facilitator. Today he banks upon his experience and network to facilitate skill and intelligence learning at the community skill shops.

His roles include managing the shop’s human-capital aspect, ensuring effective funding mechanisms and as a passionate fancy, he serves as a machine-restorer and cyclic-designer at the Paanchbatti skill shop. He is assisted by his apprentice Nuovo, an italian learner who is associated with a similar community in Torino. Nuovo helps Mrityunjai build better software frameworks and extends his family legacy of woodworking through a virtual presence setup. He last visited the Paanchbatti skill shop in January this year after having worked remotely with Mrityunjai for 3 months. Today both of them are generating value in the form of sustainable practice of utilizing damaged machine and appliance bodies and repairing and reenabling them with locally sourced forms of additive bio-material.