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Abstract
Civilization-wide transformation in the future of work signals a new socio-technical challenge in adult education and human resource development. The technologically-driven, fast-paced, and innovation-focused workplace transformation is suffused with speculative-pragmatic accounts of the rise in automation throwing an exhausted workforce into the ever-increasing demand for efficiency, capability, and skills. The socio-technical complexity in the future of work challenges adult educators, human resource development scholars, and those who are committed to the scholarships for transformation: to experiment with different ways of learning that enables affirmative approach to the upcoming socio-technical transformation in the future of work. In aims to reconfigure education as a ‘practice of constructing social horizons of hope’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 156), this transdisciplinary study experiments with a different way of knowing that facilitates inquiry into the experience of human-machine interaction in engineering education. This study seeks how a deliberately designed learning space promotes a mutual dialogue on human-machine interaction, through an embedded mixed-method inquiry with 30 undergraduate and graduate engineering students. Participants experienced the indirect guidance of a technological device, which in this study is called a nudge. Under the deception of artificial intelligence sending out nudges during the work process, participants with inquiry-based learning intervention exhibited a more attentive perception of the sensorial experience with the nudge device compared to the other groups (i.e., lecture-based group and a control group without any intervention). The findings allude that inquiry-based learning inviting non-human actors (i.e., technology) into the learning activity yields more nuanced perceptions of technology. Also, the young adult learners’ different imaginations of engineering practices are surfaced throughout their learning from nudge experience. I included the autoethnographic accounts of my experience in the challenges of conducting transdisciplinary work as a novice qualitative researcher in the context of the future of work in collaboration with the mechanical engineering team. This dissertation is a momentary rupture of my continuing inquiry into the future of work with a cultivated taste for affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2013; 2019) and generative knowing (Nicolaides, 2022).