This study on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) presents key...
Tag: work practice
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...
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...
Can I Get a Witness? The Limits of Evidence in Healthcare Quality Evaluation Systems in American Hospitals
“I got verbals, but verbals don’t hold up in court….I need it in black and white.” After Sheila submits hospital quality data to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), reports indicate that her data hasn’t been received. She makes countless calls to the CMS Help Desk to get answers....
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,...
My AI versus The Company AI: How Knowledge Workers Conceptualize Forms of AI Assistance in the Workplace
GSuite is changing the nature of Knowledge Work across 5 million businesses through AI-powered assistance. To ensure that this evolution reflects the aspirations and priorities of workers, Google and Stripe Partners conducted a multi-national ethnography of Knowledge Workers covering a range of...
Back to the Future of Work: Informing Corporate Renewal
This paper describes the results of a multi-year ethnographic study of how knowledge workers integrate new technology into their work practices. We studied mobile and remote workers who use smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, and social networking to support their work. Study findings describe...
Ethnographic Inspection Identifying Project Risks
We propose a new approach for project inspection applying ethnography to identifying IT system project risks. Guideline-based inspection is generally conducted in the IT industry to reduce project risks. Guidelines are created based on analysis of failures in past projects. However, it is...
Scaling Out (Not Only Up): Distributed Collaboration Models to Get Work Done
In this catalyst, we the authors describe the benefits of ‘scaling out’: reaching out beyond one's organization to bring in external partners to accomplish UX research. Organizations scale out their research efforts in order to cover more ground, draw from more specialties, or conduct more...