Hot desking has become a popular practice, specially within modern office environments. This test aims to point out some of the hot desking challenges that individuals face through four absurd and playful tasks. The design has been purposely curated to test one's patience.

Hot desking is intricately linked to technology run office spaces that provide a fast changing, flexible and adaptable space organisation. However, this not only raises data privacy concerns for employees, but it also comes with several personal challenges that are often dismissed. For those who find comfort in a regular routine table arrangement, do not possess particularly good orientation skills, carry too many belongings or struggle to start a conversation with strangers might find hot desking problematic. Bright clashing colours that present pointless and tedious tasks intent to trigger irritation, frustration and annoyance. The onboarding process is the absurd data consent agreement. This is to encourage the audience to question the data the technology can gather from each individual when using such services in the workspace. Each task presents a different personal challenge that individuals face when hot desking. Task 01 - Looks into the navigation as an additional job that has to taken into account when hot desking as it changes on a regular basis. Moreover, it also highlights the often preferred table locations being in high demand and creating a competitive environment. On top of that it also points out the constant need to be connected to a phone and therefore work. Task 02 - Ever changing table setting inevitably lead to be seated next to new people on a regular basis. This can become somewhat tricky when one needs to focus on work and concentrate or needs to find a specific person within a working team. The text shape is inspired by a beehive to symbolise the community feeling rhetoric often found in hot desking environments. Task 03 - This one is a combination of the previous disorientation issues together with the socialising challenges. A degree of difficulty is added to the task by including the stressful speed one can experience through the fast paced setting. Task 04 - The last task is a reflective questionnaire that recapitulates on most of the previous points allowing the audience to adopt a self reflective attitude. The result reading is purposely pointless and written in an overly optimistic tone to evoke a sense of anger to the reader as it simplifies challenges that perhaps one cannot or does not want to nor needs to over come and opens reflection to alternative working environments as well as better the current hot desking systems for a more user friendly approach.

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Institution : Royal College of Art

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Emma Aparici

Emma Aparici

Emma Aparici

Emma Aparici

Emma Aparici

Emma Aparici