Sean Rintel
Senior Principal Research Manager
New Future of Work Symposium 2020
On 3-5 August 2020, Gloria Mark and I co-chaired the inaugural Microsoft 2020 New Future of Work Symposium.
The New Future of Work Symposium virtually hosted over 200 researchers from 21 countries to discuss the challenges to productivity, wellbeing, and society that we face due to the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.
Three days were spent learning how the new reality of distributed information work inspires us to revolutionize our work practices and technologies to support the sustainable and robust distribution of people, resources, and knowledge.
The symposium featured:
- Keynotes by Susan David (Harvard Medical School) on “Emotional Agility” and Devon Powers (Temple University) on “Futures for Whom?“,
- An Invited Plenary on the New Future of Work from four senior scholars: Judy Olson (UC Irvine) How To Make Distance Work Work; Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (Stanford University) “Pandemics, The 4-Day Week, and the Future of Work”; Jim Hollan (UC San Diego) “Beyond Application and Document-Centered Views of Information”; Thomas W. Malone (MIT) “Minglr: Supporting ad-hoc, private conversations online”.
- A Panel Conversation About An Inclusive Future of Work with Tawanna Dillahunt (University of Michigan), Stuart Duff (Pearn Kandola), Melissa Gregg (Intel), and Oliver Haimson (University of Michigan).
- Themed discussions involving over 60 papers from academic and corporate researchers. Please see the Publications page for details.
A report on the symposium will be forthcoming.