​This was the theme explored during the ReImagining Work. Future Scenarios Workshop, which took place in Cluj-Napoca for two days at the end of October 2019. Artists, designers, art students, cultural and educational entrepreneurs as well as representatives of Cluj Future of Work partner organizations came together to explore possible scenarios that would reflect how work would transform in the  future, focusing on culture-related fields and activities. 

The workshop is the first of the four Future Scenarios Workshops that will be organized as part of the Cluj Future of Work project. Cluj Future of Work studies and tests methods through which the city can prepare for the challenges that the future will bring to the labor market, with a focus on cultural and social aspects. 

The results of the workshops will feed a variety of scenarios, meant to inform the activities of the three core modules of Cluj Future of Work, providing guidance in developing curricula and pilot actions.The workshop outcomes will also serve as inspiration for the production of artworks to be displayed in a final exhibition, providing the visitors with an immersive experience of possible futures of work. 

Future Scenarios are a concept of foresight adapted from a scenario approach Peter Schwartz describes in his book “The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World”. This concept uses analysis of present trends in order to imagine and co-create possible future societies and developments.

For the purpose of the Cluj Future of Work project, we commissioned Time’s Up collective to facilitate a series of Future Scenarios workshops. The workshops are developed and facilitated by Tina Auer and Tim Boykett from Time’s Up, a cultural association based in Linz, Austria. We chose to work with Time’s Up due to their extensive experience in exploring various topics using tools from the arts and design, science, sociology or cultural studies. The Future Scenarios concept is part of a larger Time’s Up project, “ReImagining Work”, which is a component of an art based research project from the Institute for Industrial Design at the Vienna University of Applied Arts in collaboration with Time’s Up.

The goals of the workshop were to:

• Understand and share knowledge about how work processes, relations and structures will transform;
• Create awareness on the transformations of the labour markets;
• Stimulate imagination and create images of possible futures of work;
• Create a framework for reflection on individual and collective perspectives regarding work.

Between October 30 and 31, 2019, Tina and Tim led the participants through identifying the current work dynamics and challenges, in order to explore the transformations that will shape, reorganize and reinvent work in the future.

The first step was to map the current work trends, focusing on culture-related activities and fields. Factors such as diversity of employment forms, education, transdisciplinarity and unskilling, climate change, waste and resource management, as well as mental health, were identified as driving and impacting work at the moment and in the future. Among these, participants considered climate change and education to be the main critical issues to take into consideration for the development of the future scenarios. The participants then worked together to imagine the four different possibilities for how society, jobs and work will look like in the future:

• The Global Bubble Wizard, a world where only the smartest members of society survive, while dealing with the effects of climate change, loss of biodiversity and a collapsed Environment. 
• AquaTech, where the elite, highly educated part of society benefits and has control over the lower classes, and where environmental discipline is enforced through strict waste management and restrictive consumption. 
• The Garden of Eden, a scenario where humans were able to surpass climate catastrophe, have learned from their mistakes and are working collaboratively and transdisciplinary to preserve and care for the environment. Work done by robots have allowed humans to do whatever jobs they want to do.
• Paranoid Android, where the environment and democracy have collapsed, and society is driven by A.I and engineered solutions. A clear caste system divides society and work. 

And although very distinct and diverse, the four scenarios provided several insights:

• We cannot ignore the fact that environmental and social urgencies do and will impact not only the future of work, but also the future of humanity as a whole.
• Silos in education as well as specialization of skills benefit a certain privileged category of citizens, while collaboration and transdisciplinarity have the potential to create more social justice, job security and inclusion of a larger range of society members. 
• Work is changing, along with the number of hours or days per week we spend at work, the types of work we do, how we measure productivity and impact, and how business models are organised. 
• Mental health is an essential aspect to take into consideration, as the world and our work is becoming more complex and uncertain. For this reason, we will need to pay special attention at how we design our work environments, how we approach human relations as well as provide coaching.

Cluj Cultural Centre has commissioned a total of 4 future scenarios workshop. In addition to this first workshop, in 2020 we plan to organize the next 3 ones tackling: (1) Work 4.0. Are the Robots Coming?, (2) Culturepreneurs of the future. Cultural and Creative Industries, and (3) Informal Work.

The call for proposals for artworks inspired from the scenarios developed during the workshops will also be launched mid 2020, ending with a final exhibition in 2021 that would immerse visitors in experimenting with how their life may be impacted by their current choices and by social, political and technological developments.