Podcast: The WeWork Speculative Design Project

For our third podcast, we were very happy to host Nicolay Boyadjiev, who spoke at our annual UNStudio Summer Conference in Amsterdam. Nicolay is a Design Tutor at the Strelka Institute, which is a non-governmental education institutions based in Moscow, that has an experimental approach to studying architecture and design, offering a famously multidisciplinary academic program. For our summer conference on the theme of Ownership, we asked Nicolay the following question: “In the future, will we all be jobless?”. Throughout his talk, Nicolay looked at the gig economy, co-working, platformization and the relationship between space and labor. He primarily takes from the example of We work, arguing that beyond its intention of becoming a “Capitalist Kibbutz”, We-Work could even be viewed as a speculative design project.