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This forum focuses on the conditions and futures of the labor underpinning technology production and maintenance. We welcome standalone articles as well as interviews and conversations about all tech labor within the global supply chain of digital technologies. --- Seyram Avle and Sarah Fox, Editors

This paper examines the role of technoscientific speculation in large-scale development projects in postcolonial spaces, building on recent work in STS, design research, and postcolonial studies in and beyond CSCW. We analyze two historical cases of technology-infused development projects in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and in Jamaica. We find that speculation in these contexts remixes the constructive stance toward speculation typical for normative technoscience with the critical, contesting orientation of speculative design. Conflicts between these stances are resolved by leveraging fantasy for pragmatic ends, grounding audacious fictions in imported realities, unmooring from conventional understandings of linear technological progress, and using even conservative futures to trouble colonial conventions.

At the same time that workers' rights are generally declining in the United States (US), workplace computing systems gather more data about workers and their activities than ever before. The rise of large scale labor analytics raises questions about how and whether workers could use such data to advocate for their own goals. Here, we analyze the historical development of workplace technology design methods in CSCW to show how mid-20th century labor responses to scientific management can inform directions in contemporary digital labor advocacy. First, we demonstrate how specific methodological tendencies from industrial scientific management were adapted to work in CSCW, and then subsequently altered in crowd work and social computing research to more closely resemble industrial approaches. Next, we show how three tactics used by labor unions to strategically engage with industrial scientific management in the mid-20th century can inform data-driven worker advocacy in platform-mediated work. Finally, we discuss how this history shapes our understanding of worker participation and the implications of using worker data for contemporary advocacy goals.

HCI has long considered sites of workplace collaboration. From airline cockpits to distributed groupware systems, scholars emphasize the importance of supporting a multitude of tasks and creating technologies that integrate into collaborative work settings. More recent scholarship highlights a growing need to consider the concerns of workers within and beyond established workplace settings or roles of employment, from steelworkers whose jobs have been eliminated with post-industrial shifts in the economy to contractors performing the content moderation that shapes our social media experiences. This one-day workshop seeks to bring together a growing community of HCI scholars concerned with the labor upon which the future of work we envision relies. We will discuss existing methods for studying work that we find both productive and problematic, with the aim of understanding how we might better bridge current gaps in research, policy, and practice. Such conversations will focus on the challenges associated with taking a worker-oriented approach and outline concrete methods and strategies for conducting research on labor in changing industrial, political, and environmental contexts.

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments.

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds.

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor

To gain historical perspective on the role of technical expertise in the labor movement, we explore the data-driven practices of mid-century American labor unionists who appropriated techniques from scientific management to advocate for workers. Analyzing the data artifacts and academic writings of the Management Engineering department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, we describe the rhetorical use of data within a mutual-gains model of participation. We draw insights from the challenges faced by the department, assess the feasibility of implementing these approaches in the present, and identify opportunities for the participatory design of workplace advocacy systems moving forward.

In this chapter we analyze the rhetorical work of speculative design methods to advance third wave agendas in HCI. We contrast the history of speculative design that is often cited in HCI papers from the mid 2000s onward that frames speculative design as a critical methodological intervention in HCI linked to radical art practice and critical theory, with the history of how speculative design was introduced to HCI publications through corporate design research initiatives from the RED group at Xerox PARC. Our argument is that third wave, critically oriented, speculative design “works” in HCI because it is highly compatible with other forms of conventional corporate speculation (e.g. concept videos and scenario planning). This reading of speculative design re-centers the “criticality” from the method itself to its ability to advance agendas that challenge dominant practices in technology design. We will look at how practitioners trade on the rhetorical ambiguity of future oriented design practices to introduce these ideas in contexts where they may not otherwise have much purchase. Our chapter concludes with a call for critically oriented practitioners in this space to share their experiences navigating speculative design ambiguity and to document the disciplinary history of the method’s development.

Since Dourish's critique of 'implications for design' [15], researchers have asked how design and ethnography should or could relate in HCI. Here we reflect on two experiences with cross-informing ongoing ethnographic investigation with the early stages of research through design. One uses speculative design to reflect on and inform ethnographic fieldwork on busyness in middle-class familes; the other uses speculative design to complement late-stage analysis of a historical ethnography of rural technological infrastructure. Rather than trying to do away with the gap between ethnography and design by seamlessly integrating the two processes, we reworked the relationship between ethnography and design by closing the gap in the temporal workflows while simultaneously maintaining a distinction in the performance of the two roles. We found that this new gap resulted in a series of misunderstandings; but by putting the two roles in active dialogue, we were able leverage misunderstandings into mutual benefit.

How do you design for sustained engagement in the context of supporting or encouraging health and well-being? Two studies of a mobile social-health application reveal how different aspects of the sociotechnical design affect user engagement with the system.

We describe a method for critically informed development of new technical systems by combining analysis of historical discourse with critical technical practice. We take the case of social recommender systems, a class of algorithms that calculate which people should be recommended to whom. We demonstrate similarities between limitations of "social network" rhetoric in contemporary social matching algorithms and discourse on planning in Artificial Intelligence. We develop an algorithm for social matching that recombines "lost" ideas from the history of AI, orienting around situated behavior and algorithmic transparency. By implementing this approach in a functioning prototype called "the Strangerationist", we examine directly how conceptual commitments inform low-level technical decisions, and how available technologies shape conceptual vision. Our goal is not to design a "better" algorithm but to explore the challenges and opportunities of weaving together historical discourse and critical analysis of values embedded in technology with the experience of designing it.

We present an interview study of 34 participants in the US and Korea who described how they manage their personal data, from work files to family photos. Through their 'data narratives' - accounts of their data management practices, including device usage patterns and negotiations with system and brand ecosystems' we explore how individuals negotiate a complex, multi-service, and morally-charged sociotechnical landscape, balancing demands to share and to safeguard their data in appropriate ways against a shifting background of changing technologies, relationships, individuals, and corporations. We describe the guiding framework that people use to make decisions as a 'moral economy' of data management, contributing to our understanding of context-specific system choices.

Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.

Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use.

We present an alternative approach to the design of personal informatics systems: instead of motivating people to examine their own behaviors, this approach promotes awareness of and reflection on the infrastructures behind personal informatics and the modes of engagement that they promote. Specifically, this paper presents an interface that displays personal web browsing data. The interface aims to reveal underlying infrastructure using several methods: drawing attention to the scope of mined data by displaying deliberately selected sensitive data, using purposeful malfunction as a way to encourage reverse engineering, and challenging normative expectations around data mining by displaying information in unconventional ways. Qualitative results from a two-week deployment show that these strategies can raise people's awareness about data mining, promote efficacy and control over personal data, and inspire reflection on the goals and assumptions embedded in infrastructures for personal data analytics.

Critically oriented researchers within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have fruitfully intersected design and critical analysis to engage users and designers in reflection on underlying values, assumptions and dominant practices in technology. To successfully integrate this work within the HCI community, critically oriented researchers have tactically engaged with dominant practices within HCI in the design and evaluation of their work. This paper draws attention to the ways that tactical engagement with aspects of HCI evaluation methodology shapes and bears consequences for critically oriented research. We reflect on three of our own experiences evaluating critically oriented designs and trace challenges that we faced to the ways that sensibilities about generalizable knowledge are manifested in HCI evaluation methodology. Drawing from our own experiences, as well as other influential critically oriented design projects in HCI, we articulate some of the trade-offs involved in consciously adopting or not adopting certain normative aspects of HCI evaluation. We argue that some forms of this engagement can hamstring researchers from pursuing their intended research goals and have consequences beyond specific research projects to affect the normative discourse in the field as a whole.

This day-long workshop aims to support and grow the community of CSCW and NCI scholars that investigate the past to inform the design, critique and conceptualization of technology. At this workshop, we will learn from examples of historically-based CSCW and HCI work, explore issues in historical method that come up in such work, share methods and techniques, provide feedback and support to ongoing investigations; and define a shared agenda for future research on this topic. The workshop will also highlight research and methods that focus on non-Western contexts and that give voice to historically marginalized groups. Based on the workshop, we will develop a white paper and a website that will collect resources to support CSCW based historical investigations.