How did the 8 hour work day, 40 hour work week come into existence? If I had to make an educated guess, it’s probably tied to the industrial revolution enabling a shift from seasonal work based on seasonal agrarian output to year round production of consumer goods. Most of society today is structured around the 40 hour work week. But as technology changes the way will live, does it make sense to adopt such a rigid concept of work? If you’re not directly involved in the manual production of good and objects, does it make sense to gauge production based on hours worked in a week?

Drawing on personal experience, I got my first real 9 to 5 job coming out of college. Technically, it also can be considered my last 9 to 5 job. I remember only really working 4 hours out of the day. The work i did was not particularly challenging. In fact, I needed to find ways to fill my time so that I could clock in a full 8 hours everyday without getting tired from staring at the clock. Eventually, i used the time wisely and acquired new skills that allowed me to advance to a more challenging position.

As i reflect from an employer’s standpoint, my company did not get their money’s worth. They paid me for 8 hours of work, for something most people could do in half the time. I’m willing to bet that most non manual labor based employers are inefficiently using their employees, just as i was inefficiently being employed.

So what is the next question…how do you get the most out of people, in non manual labor jobs? I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. There are people who dedicate their whole lives to this question, and in some sense it has become their work to make workers more efficient.

I would presume that it’s important to define what is the meaning of work. There are probably many definitions, but I’m going to use the following: Work is the act of completing a defined task for a defined reward. In most cases, Employers establish the definition of the tasks and the rewards. This definition requires that work falls in a certain paradigm. There is a boss, there are employees, and their is work to be done.

Work is the act of completing a defined task for a defined reward.

There probably is a different way to look at this paradigm.

• There are leaders, there are followers, and there are goals to be accomplished.
• There are problems to be solved, evidenced to be gathered, and answers to be found.
• There are causes that you recognized as important, people that will contribute, and experiences to obtained.

I prefer looking at work in this manner, it makes more sense.

Scott Gamer created a lyric visualizer that produces real time motion graphics based on parameter settings. It’s well done in my opinion.

Project Link

• http://scott.j38.net/interactive/typestar/

Attached Files:

• Iakov Chernikhov Drawings

So here what’s on my horizon.

• An interactive installation based on what i’ve learned from whispernode.
• A list of clients for my commercial endeavors.

I’m also glad i went to a design architecture school…I got away with not making a basswood model for my thesis; the hands I inherited are not so nimble and dexterous.