Hanxiao Mao

Hanxiao Mao is a product designer based in London and China.

During RCA 2-year Deign Product MA study, she explored broad interests in different fields with learning new techniques and challenges, and critically explores ethics from politics, society, technology and humanity itself. In her opinion, design is like building “bridges" constantly, from objects to people, and from people to the next level. That's the beauty of design.

Exhibition

London Craft Week, The future of Craft, 'Machine's Improvisation', 2022

WIP Show, Royal College of Art, 2022 ;

In 1930, Keynes made a famous prediction, "after one hundred years, the working week would be dramatically cut to perhaps 15 hours a week", because machines will take people's jobs, "with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied."

One hundred years later, however, we need to spend more time working, such as 996. Or even, do we become labour machines that don't stop repetitive working?

In politics, some employment or job-creation means seem to alleviate social and economic problems, but in fact, they transfer the dilemma to people's spiritual life. More and more people fall into a kind of nihilism of work -- assembly line of life and meaningless repetitive labor are killing people's passion for life, so that people lose the courage to escape, and namely trapped in the vicious circle of work.

We are now on the eve of the possible mass displacement of labor by artificial intelligence, and the nihilism of work ethics has reached midnight, but we cannot drown in pessimism.

Change must come. It must come.