At the Milan Triennale, on the sidelines of a beautiful exhibition on things we don’t know we don’t know, there is a photo that dates back to 1964: above the photo a designer wrote, in large letters, the division of our time: 8 hours of work, 8 hours to sleep and 8 hours of free time. Or freed, which they said then when reduced working hours were rightly seen as an achievement. A liberation in fact.
Smart working and war
by Riccardo Luna
With digital technology, that division into equal parts of our day no longer holds up for a long time: and not only because many don’t sleep 8 hours due to stress, but because the boundaries between work and free time are increasingly blurred. Smart working has accelerated this phenomenon: and for many, the office has become a room in the house, or even a bench in a park. With the result that the office institution is disappearing. First it was abandoned by employeeswho prefer to work managing their work duties in a more flexible way so as not to penalize the family; and now it is the companies that close them and sell them to save on costs that start to become meaningless.
I thought it was Elon and instead it was Brunetta
by Riccardo Luna
It is a trend that affects all large companies, the latest being Rai which has a huge and often antiquated real estate portfolio that is partly about to end up on the market: soon there will be shared desks for employees in turn. Is called desk sharing and in fact it is the coworking invented in Silicon Valley a decade ago. In short, an era is ending, started, according to some modern canons, in 1903 when the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the first office of a large company in Buffalo, near New York, with cabinets destined to become file cabinets, air conditioning and toilets for employees. The office was an institution of the 20th century: moreover, it was an aspiration. It was a sign that you had a job: and as soon as it was yours you brought us the photo of your spouse, the drawings of the children, some even a plan to make it intimate. Now it is the houses that are starting to look like offices, with PCs and printers in the bedroom. Some boundaries will have to be placed.
11th Episode
Italian Tech sends me, the right to connect (and disconnect)
by Ernesto Belisario, Francesca Ricciulli
