This paper examines LLM deployment through African lenses that engage the continent’s complex social,...
Tag: agency
“I Pick My Poison”: Agency and Addiction in the Age of Subscriptions
This paper illuminates key aspects of the subscription economy and offers a framework for understanding customer...
Beyond Zoom Fatigue: Ritual and Resilience in Remote Meetings
COVID-19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from...
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 and ethicists: namely human well-being and social inequality. The paper uses experience designing human interactions with highly...
A.I. among Us: Agency in a World of Cameras and Recognition Systems
This paper reports on the use and perceptions of deployed A.I. and recognition social-material assemblages in China and the USA. A kaleidoscope of “boutique” instantiations is presented to show how meanings are emerging around A.I. and recognition. A model is presented to highlight that not all...
Designing Good Jobs: Participatory Ethnography and Prototyping in Service-oriented Work Ecosystems
Three service design projects, in hospitality, finance, and health care, highlight how to design for agency in the workplace, including the implementation of automated and data-driven tools. Inspired by Tacchi, Slater, and Hearn's work on ethnographic action research, Amartya Sen's capabilities...
How to Avoid Path Dependency: Learnings from Neuroscience, Physics, and Organizational Theory
In 1814, the polymath Pierre Simon Laplace posited that “We may regard the present state of the universe as the...
Ethnography for Sensemaking in Times of Trauma
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work Kimberly Kay Hoang 2015, 248pp, University of California Press The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age Valerie Francisco-Menchavez 2018, 256pp, University...
From ‘Cool Science’ to Changing the World: The Opportunity to Support Pre-startup Science Commercialization through Ethnography and Human-centered Design
Introducing an emerging context for human-centered design work, this paper extends previous EPIC literature on startup innovation upstream into university science commercialization. It provides new perspectives on how the human-centered design community can engage with scientific models of agency...
Kites Rise against the Wind: 20 Years of Research
Across two decades, our journey as research practitioners has been undeniably dynamic, defined by moments of...