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The concept of ‘bodywork´ refers to the work individuals undertake on their own bodies and the bodies of others. One aspect is attending to bodily needs, which is often overlooked in the workplace and HCI/CSCW research on work practices. Yet, this labour can be a significant barrier to work, consequential to work, and prone to spill over into other aspects of life. We present three empirical cases of bodywork: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and office-based knowledge work. We describe what attending to bodily needs at work entails and illustrate tactics employed so that work can be carried on, even when the body (or technology optimising it) breaks down. Arguing that all systems are bodily systems, we conclude with a call to acknowledge the centrality of bodies in all work and the roles technologies can play in supporting or constraining bodywork differently for different workers.

Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work.

Food delivery platforms are location-based services that rely on minimal, quantifiable data points, such as GPS location, to represent and manage labor. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of food delivery work in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the challenges gig workers face when working with a platform that uses their (phone’s) GPS location to monitor and control their movement. Further, we describe how these, along with the platform’s opaque, location-based logics, shape the delivery workflow. We also document how the platform selectively represented workers’ bodies during the pandemic to portray them as safe and sterile, describing workers’ tactics in responding to issues arising from asymmetric platform policies. In discussion, we consider what we can learn from understanding gig workers as ‘infrastructure’, commonly overlooked but visible upon breakdown. We conclude by reflecting on how we might center gig workers’ well-being and bodily needs in design.

The advent of autonomous cars creates a range of new questions about road safety, as well as a new collaborative domain for CSCW to analyse. This paper uses video data collected from five countries - India, Spain, France, Chile, and the USA - to study how road users interact with each other. We use interactional video analysis to document how co-ordination is achieved in traffic not just through the use of formal rules, but through situated communicative action. Human movement is a rich implicit communication channel and this communication is essential for safe manoeuvring on the road, such as in the co-ordination between pedestrians and drivers. We discuss five basic movements elements: gaps, speed, position, indicating and stopping. Together these elements can be combined to make and accept offers, show urgency, make requests and display preferences. We build on these results to explore lessons for how we can design the implicit motion of self-driving cars so that these motions are understandable - in traffic - by other road users. In discussion, we explore the lessons from this for designing the movement of robotic systems more broadly.

Using publicly uploaded videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars, this paper documents how self-driving vehicles still struggle with some basics of road interaction. To drive safely self-driving cars need to interact in traffic with other road users. Yet traffic is a complex, long established social domain. We focus on one core element of road interaction: when road users yield for each other. Yielding – such as by slowing down for others in traffic – involves communication between different road users to decide who will ‘go’ and who will ‘yield’. Videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars show how these systems fail to both yield for others, as well as failing to go when yielded to. In discussion, we explore how these ‘problems’ illustrate both the complexity of designing for road interaction, but also how the space of physical machine/human social interactions more broadly can be designed for., https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3544548.3581045

This paper considers food delivery work as a form of piecework that is conducted via a particular workflow system -- the food delivery platform and its delivery app. We offer an ethnographic account of food delivery labor during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian city of Pune. Our inquiry is focused on (1) the workflow that structures food delivery work and (2) how economic considerations shape how workers work with and around the workflow. Our findings depict both the workflow that structures the delivery work and the efforts workers make beyond it to deal with contingencies and unexpected requirements they encounter on the ground. We recognize the workers' efforts as essential to make the workflow work but also to make the piecework arrangement work for them. We highlight how, in this setting, money is not just the motivation for engaging in gig work; rather, economic considerations infuse every aspect of the work process. Acknowledging the distinct shape gig work takes in a Global South context, our study highlights the value of in-depth,in situ understandings of how gig workers' economic considerations are entangled with their interactions with the technology that structures their work. Our key contribution lies in mapping outthe workflow of piecework andthe work to make piecework work, specifically in a Global South setting, by drawing upon classic CSCW themes around workflows and piecework to strengthen the contemporary scholarly discussion concerning gig work.

The advent of autonomous cars creates a range of new questions about road safety, as well as a new collaborative domain for CSCW to analyse. This paper uses video data collected from five countries - India, Spain, France, Chile, and the USA - to study how road users interact with each other. We use interactional video analysis to document how co-ordination is achieved in traffic not just through the use of formal rules, but through situated communicative action. Human movement is a rich implicit communication channel and this communication is essential for safe manoeuvring on the road, such as in the co-ordination between pedestrians and drivers. We discuss five basic movements elements: gaps, speed, position, indicating and stopping. Together these elements can be combined to make and accept offers, show urgency, make requests and display preferences. We build on these results to explore lessons for how we can design the implicit motion of self-driving cars so that these motions are understandable - in traffic - by other road users. In discussion, we explore the lessons from this for designing the movement of robotic systems more broadly.

Using publicly uploaded videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars, this paper documents how self-driving vehicles still struggle with some basics of road interaction. To drive safely self-driving cars need to interact in traffic with other road users. Yet traffic is a complex, long established social domain. We focus on one core element of road interaction: when road users yield for each other. Yielding - such as by slowing down for others in traffic - involves communication between different road users to decide who will 'go' and who will 'yield'. Videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars show how these systems fail to both yield for others, as well as failing to go when yielded to. In discussion, we explore how these 'problems' illustrate both the complexity of designing for road interaction, but also how the space of physical machine/human social interactions more broadly can be designed for.

From light bulbs to smart locks, IoT is increasingly embed- ded into our homes and lives. This opens up new vulnerabili- ties as IoT devices can be hacked and manipulated to cause harm or discomfort. In this paper we document users’ ex- periences of having their IoT systems hacked through 210 self-reports from Reddit, device support forums, and Amazon review pages. These reports and the discussion around them show how uncertainty is at the heart of ’being hacked’. Hacks are sometimes difficult to detect, and users can mistake un- usual IoT behaviour as evidence of a hack, yet this can still cause considerable emotional hurt and harm. In discussion, we shift from seeing hacks as technical system failings to be repaired, to seeing them as sites for care and user support. Such a shift in perspective opens a new front in designing for hacking - not just prevention but alleviating harm.

It is often assumed that the interests of users and developers coincide, sharing a common goal of good design. Yet users often desire functionality that goes beyond what designers, and the organisations they work in, are willing to supply. Analysing online forums, complemented with interviews, we document how users, hackers and software developers worked together to discover and apply system exploits in hardware and software. We cover four cases: users of CPAP breathing assistance machines getting access to their own sleep data, 'hacking' the Nintendo switch game console to run non-authorised software, end-users building their own insulin supply system, and farmers repairing their own agriculture equipment against suppliers terms and conditions. We propose the concept of the 'gulf of interests' to understand how differing interests can create conflicts between end-users, designers, and the organisations they work in. This points us in the direction of researching further the political and economic situations of technology development and use.

With growing interest in how technology can make sense of our body and bodily experiences, this work looks at how these experiences are communicated through and with the help of technology. We present the ways in which knowledge about sleep, and how to manipulate it, is collectively shared online. This paper documents the sleep-change practices of four groups of 'Sleep Hackers' including Nurses, Polyphasic Sleeper, Over-sleepers, and Biohackers. Our thematic analysis uses 1002 posts taken from public forums discussing sleep change. This work reveals the different ways individuals share their experiences and build communal knowledge on how to 'hack' their sleep -- from using drugs, external stimulation, isolation, and polyphasic sleeping practices where segmented sleep schedules are shared between peers. We describe how communal discussions around the body and sleep can inform the development of body sensing technology. We discuss the opportunities and implications for designing for bodily agency over sleep changes both in relation to collaboratively developed understandings of the body and social context of the user. We also discuss notions of slowly changing bodily processes and sensory manipulation in relation to how they can build on the exploration of soma-technology.

It is often assumed that the interests of users and developers coincide, sharing a common goal of good design. Yet users often desire functionality that goes beyond what designers, and the organisations they work in, are willing to supply. Analysing online forums, complemented with interviews, we document how users, hackers and software developers worked together to discover and apply system exploits in hardware and software. We cover four cases: users of CPAP breathing assistance machines getting access to their own sleep data, 'hacking' the Nintendo switch game console to run non-authorised software, end-users building their own insulin supply system, and farmers repairing their own agriculture equipment against suppliers terms and conditions. We propose the concept of the 'gulf of interests' to understand how differing interests can create conflicts between end-users, designers, and the organisations they work in. This points us in the direction of researching further the political and economic situations of technology development and use.

From light bulbs to smart locks, IoT is increasingly embedded into our homes and lives. This opens up new vulnerabilities as IoT devices can be hacked and manipulated to cause harm or discomfort. In this paper we document users' experiences of having their IoT systems hacked through 210 self-reports from Reddit, device support forums, and Amazon review pages. These reports and the discussion around them show how uncertainty is at the heart of 'being hacked'. Hacks are sometimes difficult to detect, and users can mistake unusual IoT behaviour as evidence of a hack, yet this can still cause considerable emotional hurt and harm. In discussion, we shift from seeing hacks as technical system failings to be repaired, to seeing them as sites for care and user support. Such a shift in perspective opens a new front in designing for hacking - not just prevention but alleviating harm.

Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how participants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each displaying participants' online understanding of the instructions and different articulations between demonstrations and practical task: pausing to raise a correspondence problem, to keep up with the video, and to turn to action. From this exemplar case, we discuss how ordinary people experience and make time with interactive media.

Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how participants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each displaying participants' online understanding of the instructions and different articulations between demonstrations and practical task: pausing to raise a correspondence problem, to keep up with the video, and to turn to action. From this exemplar case, we discuss how ordinary people experience and make time with interactive media.

Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how participants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each displaying participants' online understanding of the instructions and different articulations between demonstrations and practical task: pausing to raise a correspondence problem, to keep up with the video, and to turn to action. From this exemplar case, we discuss how ordinary people experience and make time with interactive media., QC 20201202

Instructional videos have become an important site of everyday learning. This paper explores how these videos are used to complete practical tasks, analyzing video-recorded interactions between pairs of users. Users need to repeatedly pause their videos to be able to follow the instructions, and we document how pausing is used to coordinate and interweave watching and doing. We describe four purposes and types of pausing: finding task objects, turning to action, keeping up, and fixing problems. Building on these results, we discuss how video players could better support following instructions, and the role of basic user interface functions in complex tasks involving different forms of engagement with the physical world and with screen-based activity.

This paper documents the experiences of those living under state surveillance. We interviewed our participants about how they lived under threat, and how it changed their technology practices. Our participants spanned three groups - journalists who reported from countries where their activities were illegal; activists who took part in civil disobedience, and individuals who worked in illegal activities that would have likely led to prosecution. In our analysis we cover four themes: first, 'the imagined surveillant'. Second, the danger and dependencies of technology use, third, their coping strategies, and lastly how belonging to a group can protect but also expose. In our discussion we cover how we can design for dissidents, and how to deal with the difficult questions this raises. We conclude by advocating for research that takes into account a critical view of the state in HCI and more broadly for an anti-surveillance stance in the design of technologies.

HCI research on mobility and transport has been dominated by a focus on the automobile. Yet urgent environmental concerns, along with new transport technologies, have created an opportunity for new ways of thinking about how we get from A to B. App-based services, innovations in electric motors, along with changing urban transport patterns, are transforming public transit. Technology is creating new collective transit services, as well as new ways for individuals to move, such as through rental, free-floating e-scooters, so called 'micro-mobility'. This workshop seeks to discuss and establish HCI perspectives on these new mobilities - engaging with and even inventing new modes of transport, fostering collaboration between scholars with varied topical interests around mobility. We seek to bring together a group of industry and academic collaborators, bringing new competences to HCI around the exciting opportunities of redesigning our contemporary mobilities.

While the legalisation of and policies around e-scooters remain the cause of much debate worldwide, this article sheds lights on e-scooter users’ current practices and their interactions with pedestrians in the city. Taking an ethnomethodological approach to public space and mobility, we use video recordings of e-scooter riders to show, firstly, how riders dismount and then move to acquire rights to continue moving, thereby ‘playing’ with traffic rules, in order to weave rapidly through congested urban environments. Secondly, we examine how e-scooter riders and pedestrians deal with the potentially unexpected appearance of e-scooters via displays of attention, adjustments of speed, and the relative rights and obligations established via category-relevant spaces. The findings offer insights into the integration of e-scooters as one of what may be many new forms of electric powered micro-mobility in urban space.

The worldwide deployment of rental electric scooters has generated new opportunities for urban mobility, but also intensified conflict over public space. This article reports on an ethnographic study of both rental and privately-owned e-scooters, mapping out the main problems and potentials around this new form of 'micro-mobility'. While it suffers from problems of reliability and conflict, user experience is an important part of e-scooters' appeal, an enjoyable way of 'hacking the city'. E-scooters have a hybrid character: weaving through the city, riders can switch between riding as a pedestrian, a car or a bicycle. Building on these results, we discuss how e-scooters, ridesharing services, and their apps could develop further, alongside the role for HCI in re-thinking urban transport and vehicle design.

Although the vehicle horn is a minimal audible unit for communication, we will show that its uses are impressively varied. Drawing upon a corpus of video recordings from dashcams, we show how drivers use the horn for creating awareness; how they target particular vehicles; and how they use it for warnings, for complaints, and in instructing the seeing of an aspect of an ambiguous traffic object. Drivers' use of the horn involves, first, their sounding it in recognizable relations to past, current, and projected configurations of traffic on the road. Second, it involves drivers manipulating the vehicle horn to create sounds of shorter and longer durations that can then produce hearably distinct actions. Third, and finally, the driver can use the horn as an initiating or responsive action in relation to the actions of other members of traffic. The data are from road users in Chennai, India.