Reconfiguring Work in the Age of AI
What is the nature of expertise and work? How are they redefined, practiced, and personified as waves of technological and social change move in and out over time?...
Reflections on Being a Resilient Researcher
What does mobility research look like today? In the highly mediated world we’ve all become used to operating in—spending hours on end in video conference meetings,...
How New is the New? Reflecting on How to Design for Tomorrow through the Case of Autonomous Vehicles
An EPIC2021 Sponsored Panel by Waymo How do we anticipate the futures of the things we are bringing into the world, and the experiences they will help shape? The...
Calibrating Agency: Human-Autonomy Teaming and the Future of Work amid Highly Automated Systems
This paper explores how the design of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence in work systems relates to broader issues of interest to social scientists...
Agency and Innovation
EPIC2019 Panel, Providence, Rhode Island Robotics, machine learning, and other technologies are provoking new hopes and fears about human agency. Tropes of the charismatic...
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
In this paper we explore the idea of a system of care through a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit...
Doing Design Research in a Cognitive World
EPIC2017 Platinum Panel Overview Increasingly, experiences are being created that incorporate augmented intelligence, promising to make us smarter, more efficient,...
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars....
Keynote Address: Pedestrian Perspectives
An anthropologist with a long career at the intersection of social research and business and technology, Melissa Cefkin began working on autonomous vehicles in 2015,...
Speculating about Autonomous Futures: Is This Ethnographic?
As researchers working on automated vehicles, we are grappling with fundamental questions about how to do research and design for the future. Or, to be more precise,...
Developing Socially Acceptable Autonomous Vehicles
Case Study—Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the...
A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job
Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer “sharing economy” are all coming together to transform...