Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-RM: Augmentation for Tomorrow: Expanding the Future Capacities of Independent Workers

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Technological advancements are changing how people work, what they are able to accomplish, and what they imagine to be possible. One aim of these advancements has long been to augment workers' capacities. However, these efforts have often focused narrowly on improving productivity and safety rather than enhancing personal well-being or creativity. This research promotes the idea that technology--if well designed--can support workers' needs holistically, and only in embracing this approach can we design sustainable human/technology partnerships for the future. The investigators will collaborate with independent knowledge workers in domains such as media, law, and scholarship, who are not full-time employees in traditional organizations. These workers often enjoy the freedom to organize their work relative to a variety of factors. However, as part of this freedom, they often feel pressure to effectively manage tasks, time, clients, collaborators, finances, reputations, and multiple non-professional aspects of their lives on their own. By attending to how this population integrates work, family, home, volunteer responsibilities, and other pursuits into their daily lives, this research will provide design inspiration for ensuring a more humane work experience in the future and inform related policy, infrastructure, and training discussions. The researchers will observe a sample of independent knowledge workers in their professional environments (equally distributed on the West Coast and East Coast). Each worker will be interviewed before and after each observation. Collected data will be analyzed in collaboration with a third member of the research team, a design researcher, who will conduct a debrief session after each observation with the requisite investigator to elicit additional insights from the field. The data will be processed to create a series of design workbooks that will be used to support joint data analysis, identify data gaps, and generate inputs for the final year of the study. During this period, the research team will conduct participatory design workshops with the independent workers who participated in the earlier phase of the study. The investigators will also disseminate information about how human/technology partnerships can be reimagined to support a more expansive understanding of the future of work. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.