Futures of Digital Work: Pontus Wärnestål

“We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us.”
attributed to Marshall Mcluhan
Take for instance the service design blueprint, a basic tool taught to design students around the world. The newly released “Wake Me Up” by Wham was blasting on the radio the year this tool was first presented in 1984. Since then the tool has not changed much, but the world surely has. In the more and more messy polycrisis that we find ourselves in, tools like the service design blueprint which are based on linear thinking are obsolete.
“We need new tools to address these new challenges” explains Pontus Wärnestål, Service Designer and Human-Computer Interaction researcher and Deputy Professor at Halmstad University.
And the challenges are many among the multilayers of environmental and social crisis. While at the same time rapidly emerging technology is dressed in the lamb's clothing of solving everything while, in truth, creating a whole new stressor on the same issues.
“If you don't understand generative technology and the environmental impact of processes around that, you are borderline unprofessional.” Pontus explains.
While he is critical of how the tremendous cost of energy and water is widely ignored by proponents of generative technologies, Pontus is by no means against incorporating in the work of service designers. In his view AI can be a significant ally in making processes more circular. In Pontus talk he proposes what some clear, hands-on examples of these workflows could look like. Acknowledging that there is alway a risk when working with these technologies as they demand a concentration of power. Therefore the service designers of the future need to be critical thinkers who are able to see the world in its complexity and understand who is being helped and who is not.