#3 WeWork Speculative Design Project with Nicolay Boyadjiev

UNS Talks

For our third podcast, we were very happy to host Nicolay Boyadjiev, who spoke at our annual UNStudio Summer Conference in Amsterdam. Nicolai 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 Nicolai the following question: “In the future, will we all be jobless?”. Throughout his talk, Nicolai 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.