Yesterday I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the company of â??Demosâ?? and some very nice people who are running a project called â??Glasgow2020â??.
Glasgow 2020 is looking at the future of Glasgow (or, as the name suggests, how Glasgow will be in 2020) and this particular event was asking us to consider the future of the workplace by taking us out of the office and on a boat ride down the Clyde. The event finished with a presentation by â??Robb Mitchellâ?? of the Chateau and New Media Scotland, and Pat Kane, formerly (and currently I think) of â??Hue and Cryâ??, and now a thinker on the future of work and creativity and the author of â??The Play Ethicâ??
This unlikely double act made some nice, if slightly incoherant, observations about social space and the blurring line between work and the rest of the world. Pat did seem to get a little carried away by his own rhetoric around the democratisation of technology, and the need for us all to have access to the technology which will (apparently) free us all to be independent networked workers in this brave new world. His point about access to emerging technology is an important one in that the ‘city’ should strive towards equality of access, but there was a general consensus that society needs to also encourage non-technical social innovations if we’re going to head towards a nicer city to live in, and away from a world of techno-haves and techno-have not’s, (or away from a world where that matters).
Anyway, as we docked at the end of the day one certainty was foremost in my mind. In Glasgow in the year 2020 it will probably, more likely than not, be raining.