Work isn’t what it used to be. Across the UK, a significant portion of the workforce does not have a traditional nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday job. Around 13% of working people work for themselves and many more work in very small or micro businesses employing one to five people, where factors like location and working hours can be very different from working in a large corporation.
In the North East, 88% of working people are employed by micro businesses. Those who took part in the New Work project during Dott 07 agreed that new ways of working offer new opportunities, but also bring new problems.
Grant Carruthers, who works for e-learning consultancy Bright Creatives, a North Shields business employing just two people, says: ‘A lot of small businesses can’t spend much time on trying to develop their own thing. They’re busy trying to do the work and at the same time trying to develop their own business as well.’
Dott 07 wanted to know how people in a micro business worked and to develop some practical design steps to improve their day-to-day experience. A group of designers, led by project management company Enabling Concepts, was given the task of getting small businesses involved in redesigning the way they work.
Asking the experts
The designers began by talking to the experts. As the North East is a hot spot of micro business activity they recruited a group of six business people who knew what it was like to work on their own or with only one or two others, and who could provide different perspectives drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds. They included an osteopath, a software developer, a landscape gardener, a bicycle retailer, an e-learning consultant and a PR and communications company.
Helen Kerrigan, from Enabling Concepts, which led the project, said: ‘You would think there were no connections. How can somebody with a bicycle shop help an osteopath? The only thing they have in common is that they’re all working for themselves. But we can help with so many different parts of their business.’
Picturing the problem
The six businesses’ first job was to understand what problems they had in common. Some common themes emerged:
- Working from home might not involve lengthy or costly travel to an office every day but people can feel isolated working alone
- The potential to share skills and expertise with colleagues is limited when you work in a very small group
- Offices are too small to hold meetings, and cafés or restaurants are often too noisy to hold serious business meetings.
- These concerns became the focus of the team’s effort and, as the ‘ask the user’ approach had worked to identify the problems to be tackled and the scope of the project, it became the model for the team’s response as well.
A user-centred co-design team was established, led by Enabling Concepts and including service designers from agency live|work and one representative from each of the micro businesses, all of whom said they were most definitely not designers. But as part of the co-design team they were given the tools and techniques they needed to design a response to their work problems.
The future of work
The world of work is changing more rapidly than at any other time in history. So what might workplaces look like in the future?
Here are four futuristic work concepts:
Disciples of the cloud
Businesses control all their own ideas, products or services and determine where and when work takes place.
Electronic cottages
Businesses are in control of what they do, but workers can determine where, when and how they work.
Replicants
Businesses depend on specialist consultants, their expertise and ideas, products or services. Work is much less predictable and reliable, but workers are free to choose where, when and how much they work.
Mutual worlds
Businesses operate as cooperatives of independent contractors. Ideas, products or services are controlled by workers, who focus on small local ventures, often connected to networks of similar ventures elsewhere to give scale.
Source: 'The way to work: Space, place and technology in 2016' a report by Orange
Dott07
Designs of the time '07 (Dott07) was a year-long series of design projects run by the Design Council and the regional development agency One NorthEast to involve local people in exploring how design can improve everyday life. www.dott07.com
