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Robots and Avatars Forum – Our Colleagues of the Future?

Wednesday 25th November 2009

The first Robots and Avatars Forum was co-produced by body>data>space and NESTA and initiated the programme with an intense day of debate on how young people today will work and play with new virtual and physical forms in 10-15 years time.

Attendees were invited from the education, creative industries, new media sectors, Robotics and Avatar worlds, work and behavioural psychologists, artists and key experts from future economy and future workplace. The day included keynote speeches from UK based and international experts, plus working groups and innovative panel discussions to explore the themes in depth.

The Forum aimed to envision the skill-sets, aptitudes, resources and methodologies that will be required by today‘s young people at work in 2020 onwards, given that so many of the jobs they will do have not been invented yet.

Some questions we explored:

• What potential challenges does the education sector face in preparing young people with the right creative skills and attitudes for their future work environments?
• With new representational forms in virtual and physical life – robots and avatars – likely to be a part of everyday working life, what will the working day for future generations entail?
• What is the emerging psychology underlying robot / avatar creation within today’s younger generations? What are the implications of this for how they learn?
• How do our robot and avatar creations reflect on ourselves? What can they teach us about ourselves?

To see images from the forum click here.