Abstract
For over 300 years, Capitalism has been the main driver of our world development, the ambition to achieve the most profit has brought the idea of achieving the highest efficiency, productivity and innovation which fueled our world to undergo rapid development. Now, 80% of the world's work able body (more than 15 years old) population has basic education, which is a 400% boost compared to the beginning of 1820 (Roser and Ortiz-Ospina, 2016), and we are reaching 100% sooner or later. In today’s development, the World Economic Forum noted that the 4th Industrial Revolution is currently happening, driven by the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence. (WEF, 2020) With that, the possibility of ultimate productivity and efficiency is just years ahead of us. This thesis would like to speculate what will happen if we work less? It is estimated an average person would work for as long as 90,000 hours of their life time or around 10 years of their life in a normal 50 years span of working life (Pryce-Jones, 2010). With that much increase of free time, what would happen? Imagining the world with less work would question the future of these buildings and this thesis would do exactly that. Even now, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many firms to allow their firms to work from home (Kelly, 2020), catalysing the reduction of office space needs. This design thesis lays down a possible solution to the reclamation of single-use office buildings in the world where we work less. Coupled with the trend that now creative visions could start making a good living, brough the demand for diversity of spaces. Through ideas of digital material and design for disassembly we will attempt to do a layered adaptation to create diverse space for the needs of the future.