As March came in faster than a speeding bullet, our time at the Situation Lab came to a close. After wishing Jeff Watson and Stuart Candy farewell, our search for our new home began in earnest. Not wanting to settle for just any place, we decided to embrace the Café Nomad lifestyle in the meantime. The good news? Nearly a month ago, we stopped being nomads and moved in with Camaraderie Coworking!
We are pretty excited to give up our nomadic ways. While working from home and coffee shops was productive, we knew it couldn’t hold up forever. There is just something about being able to create that boundary from work and life and not having to buy endless coffees to have a place to meet. And they really don’t like it when you want to do post-it note brainstorming.
We are now the Innovators-in-Residence at Camaraderie Coworking and will be starting a foresight project as we settle into our new home.
The framing for this project is based on the definition of Camaraderie: a feeling of good friendship among the people in a group.
Our proposal is to work on a project that we are calling “The Future of Camaraderie.” This project will develop 4 scenarios based on current trends in the co-working industry projected 25 years out into the future. We believe that this project will offer intellectual collateral tied to the work and vision of the co-working space. This project will also be a great way for us to engage with the members of Camaraderie in a foresight activity to help us better understanding the work culture of freelancers.
We can guarantee that we will be sharing our process and learnings along the way.
We will be practicing using foresight as a tool and methodology to explore current trends and drivers of change, a process that is meant to provoke strategies. Foresight is not to be used as a predictive tool but more so to create reactions and conversation. It is an exploration of the plausible. Strategic foresight is a combination of participatory design, research and systems thinking. We will be using Jim Dator’s work on four generic futures as the framework for this foresight work.
Camaraderie Coworking itself is part of the larger co-working ecosystem in a variety of ways, as co-founder Rachel Young is a member of Coworking Toronto & Coworking Ontario. This gives us access to coworking conversations happening locally, regionally, provincially and systemically. Trends and conversations of how freelancers and small businesses are coming together is permeating the culture of coworking spaces and actively influence the way we see the workplace.
Through this project we plan to research and explore the emerging trends that are effecting the way we work socially, technologically, ecologically, economically, and politically. Additionally looking back in history as to when we did similar activities to what we do now. At the end of this process we may end up with a shared vision document, strategies to support the uncertain future of coworking or any variety of services or products to prototype.
“The future” cannot be “predicted” because “the future” does not exist.” – Jim Dator