Emily Shanahan: Work Life Harmony

April 2020, English, 10 x 7in, 74 pages, color, spiral boundEdition of 100Design: Sming Sming Books Emily Shanahan's Work Life Harmony addresses the interweaving of labor and leisure time in organizational culture. The book combines excerpted lyrics from a 1937 edition of an IBM corporate songbook with photographs of the Amazon Spheres, three domed conservatories at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle, WA that function as an employee lounge and workspace. A transcript of Shanahan’s sound piece Breathing Exercise appears throughout the book, presenting an account of a voice assistant who loses control of their voice. Together with transparencies that float atop photographs like screens, these layered materials consider how biophilic design and the affective dimension of postdigital corporate culture transform agency into productivity. Emily Shanahan (b. 1984) was born in Montréal, Québec. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013 and completed the Whitne