The Motherload is a look at the realities of contemporary motherhood in the time of post-pandemic pressures,...
Tag: work
Frictions in the Future of Work
The concept of the "future of work", though widely-referenced in mainstream media and policy discourse, remains...
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...
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...
Foundations of Practice: An Ethnographic Exploration of Software Documentation and its Cultural Implications for an Agile Startup
This case study offers an in-depth analysis of the foundational role of documentation for software quality,...
Building Trust in AI Requires a Human at the Helm
As generative AI technology begins to touch more aspects of our work and...
Jobs Not To Be Done: Anti-Work Theory and the Resilience of Mutual Aid
This paper explores recent developments in anti-work theory to identify key learnings for ethnographers in industry. It focuses in particular on how anti-work perspectives allow us to rethink the managerial...
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...
Debugging Distributed Teamwork: New Research
An EPIC2020 Sponsored Panel presented by Atlassian The Atlassian Research & Insights team commissioned a research study that involved thousands of workers across the globe to see how COVID-19 and the sudden shift to working from home has affected them. Atlassian looked inward, too, to find out...
Boundary Crossings: Collaborative Robots and Human Workers
Agency and automation is explored through three case studies of the use of Cobots – collaborative robots – in three different auto production firms. The business challenges faced by these firms include labor shortages, quality control and reduction of waste. The Cobot solution resulted in...