Poetics of Work

Self

• Values that emerged with work (punctuality, productivity, professionalism). How they get orphaned, grandfathered, or retired when work shifts.
• How do we get matched to a job, and how has that changed over time? Family lineage, education, market demand.
• What our children make of our work, and of us. The stories kids build about what adults do all day.

Others

• Why is there so little written about the depth of our relationships with colleagues? Despite the time we spend together, our systems for talking about colleagues reduce those bonds to the dry, functional language of management. We should write poetry about colleagues and give it the attention it truly deserves. What is lost when everyone is a solo entrepreneur, and there are no colleagues
• Most knowledge workers have different relationships with their managers than manual workers. They often identify upwards and spend their careers auditioning for the next role. How did that impact office culture/politics?

Embodiment (spaces, tools, objects)

• The gap between how workers talk about their office and how employers talk about the same space.
• The desk as a personal lot in an impersonal space, and what people put on it. I want to build the largest photo collection of people's desks over time, with their commentary.
• The evolution and variations of meals and food etiquette in offices.
• The evolution of office layouts, and what each assumed about workers. For example, compare IBM around 1970 to Google now

Structure

• How did HR actually start, and how did it evolve?
• How universities became the pipeline for professional work. Universities weren't built for commerce, and now everyone has a career office.
• Commentary on foundational works, diaries, and old office manuals. What I find insightful in them.
• What Accenture's 780,000 employees actually do all day (the largest knowledge work employer), and what the full org chart looks like. I want to interview Kate Clifford.

Absence

• What do people do after work? Are they social outside the office? Do they take their work laptop with them?
• What do people do during work breaks? How structured are these breaks? What time do they choose to take them?
• In fifty years, we may see human labor the way we now see child labor. We ended child labor by giving a childhood feeling (poets romanticized it) and a structure (school). What comes after work may need the same: workers' inner lives taken seriously, and a new structure like continuous learning.

Inspiration

• On time and water: The gap between what we know and what we feel. The existing language for climate change is professional, scientific, and adequate only to itself. The Poetics of Work project is the analogous attempt for labor in the AI age: to capture what the policy conversation lacks. On the same premise. What cannot be felt cannot be reformed.
• I want to weave stories from Studs Terkel throughout the project.
• Mass Observation Project to document what they observe at work. I would love to involve more people in the project in the form of soliciting input, surveys, etc.
• Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1994). An influence not for the topic, but for his approach: an amateur approaching a topic from outside the discipline, with curiosity and playfulness.
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Close, street-level attention to how a city actually works, from someone outside the planning establishment. I want to do for the office what she did for the city.