Let’s start talking the walk:Capturing and reflecting on our limits when working with gig economy workers

Gig economy platforms are having profound impacts on when and how much we work. But it is not just the qualities of work that are changing, as these platforms have also eroded workers’ rights in disempowering workers around the world whilst making use of discourses of empowerment (e.g. flexibility, entrepreneurial values) to promote themselves. `Switch-Gig’ aimed to explore this tension by promoting empowerment and justice through discussions of the future with couriers, focusing on the role of technology in this. By doing this it hoped to provide a more just response to the attempts by digital platforms (e.g. Deliveroo, UberEats) to marginalise and control workers. But this sort of activist work is hard, and it is made harder by the lack of discussion in the LIMITS community about how to weather through the challenges inherent in the processes of ethical and activist research. It is through discussions of the challenges that we can learn not only more about the communities in focus, but also from one another. In order to make space for this discussion within LIMITS, the authors focus primarily on reflecting on their approach to the research and the process itself, over the empirical data of the study. In doing this, they hope to begin a discussion of why LIMITS’ researchers should share the pains of their processes, and more effectively mobilise the understandings of the communities we research, to move together along the path to Meadows’ vision of 2030, and to start challenging the powerful structures that prevent sustainable change

Worker-Centered Design: Expanding HCI Methods for Supporting Labor

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

What If Your Car Would Care? Exploring Use Cases For Affective Automotive User Interfaces

In this paper we present use cases for affective user interfaces (UIs) in cars and how they are perceived by potential users in China and Germany. Emotion-aware interaction is enabled by the improvement of ubiquitous sensing methods and provides potential benefits for both traffic safety and personal well-being. To promote the adoption of affective interaction at an international scale, we developed 20 mobile in-car use cases through an inter-cultural design approach and evaluated them with 65 drivers in Germany and China. Our data shows perceived benefits in specific areas of pragmatic quality as well as cultural differences, especially for socially interactive use cases. We also discuss general implications for future affective automotive UI. Our results provide a perspective on cultural peculiarities and a concrete starting point for practitioners and researchers working on emotion-aware interfaces

Disentangling participatory ICT design in socioeconomic development

Participatory design in socioeconomic development is an invariably political activity fraught with both political as well as ethical entanglements. ICT for development (ICTD) - often involved in contexts of great inequality and heteogeneity - places these in especially sharp relief. This paper draws attention to these entanglements as well as what they mean for the role and practice of designer-researchers practicing PD. We then draw upon our experiences in an active PD project to highlight approaches that serve as a partial response to these entanglements. These presents both limitations as well as orientations for our role as designer-researchers in engaging with and organising PD work in ICTD - providing a starting point for answering the question “who participates with whom in what and why?

Overview on the pathomechanisms of allergic rhinitis

Allergic rhinitis a chronic inflammatory disease of the upper airways that has a major impact on the quality of life of patients and is a socio-economic burden. Understanding the underlying immune mechanisms is central to developing better and more targeted therapies. The inflammatory response in the nasal mucosa includes an immediate IgE-mediated mast cell response as well as a latephase response characterized by recruitment of eosinophils, basophils, and T cells expressing Th2 cytokines including interleukin (IL)-4, a switch factor for IgE synthesis, and IL-5, an eosinophil growth factor and on-going allergic inflammation. Recent advances have suggested new pathways like local synthesis of IgE, the IgE-IgE receptor mast cell cascade in on-going allergic inflammation and the epithelial expression of cytokines that regulate Th2 cytokine responses (i.e., thymic stromal lymphopoietin, IL-25, and IL-33). In this review, we briefly review the conventional pathways in the pathophysiology of allergic rhinitis and then elaborate on the recent advances in the pathophysiology of allergic rhinitis. An improved understanding of the immune mechanisms of allergic rhinitis can provide a better insight on novel therapeutic targets

Towards a Postcolonial Information Studies

This panel will present several research efforts that sit at the intellectual convergence of post-colonial studies and information studies. Post-colonial studies provide a theoretical leveraging ground from which to consider themes of hybridity, multiplicity, globalization, transnationality, and alterity in relation to power and informational phenomena. From this view, efforts to bring together post-colonial perspectives to information studies encourage us to examine the historically contingent processes of the design, implementation, and use of information in global and multi-cultural contexts. As such, a post-colonial perspective can provide a lens from which to look at the way information and its artefacts travel and the implications for such migrations. However, these efforts are still nascent. This panel will be a collective opportunity to discuss the possible contours and boundaries of such an intellectual endeavor. As such, the panel will discuss some of the following questions: ??? What is the relevance of postcolonial approach to information studies? ??? What would and could a post-colonial information studies look like? ??? What are the theoretical assumptions, opportunities, and limitations of a postcolonial information studies approach? ??? What kinds of new research questions can be explored within a post-colonial information studies framework? ??? What kinds of new locations and sites of inquiry emerge within this framework? ??? What ethics and values guide a post-colonial information studies approach

“Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

This paper examines the emergence of “design thinking” as a form of technical expertise. It demonstrates that “design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain whiteness at the apex of global hierarchies of labor.“Design thinking” is a form of expertise that poses design not as form giving, but as a form of empathic reason by which executives can plan products, services, and accumulation. Silicon Valley, business schools, and reformers promote it as a form of caring technical expertise by which some guide futures for others. The paper will examine the history of the concept of “design thinking” – a category forged by Silicon Valley designers in the face of mounting competitive pressures on design professions in the United States in the mid-2000s. By drawing on artifacts, documents, public debates about the design profession from this period, I will demonstrate how champions of “design thinking” responded to expanded availability of design labor globally by figuring Asians and machines as the creative subject's Other

Chasing Innovation Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate

Microworking the Crowd

How do you turn millions of people into a CPU? Lilly Irani unravels the mysteries of human-as-computation in Amazon Mechanical Tur

Hackathons and the Cultivation of Platform Dependence

Private firms, public institutions, and civil society organizations have taken up hackathons as a way of engaging publics in technological innovation all over the world. This chapter offers ethnographic and historical case studies of three hackathons: a citizen-organized hackathon in Delhi, India; a global, multi-city hackathon convened by the World Bank; and a private sector hackathon in Silicon Valley. As short-term, volunteer run events, these hackathons functioned to extend and valorize existing infrastructural investments at the expense of longer-term, more costly, but more locally relevant infrastructural investments. The events also enlisted those privileged with coding skills, English skills, and teamwork skills as mediators of local community needs rather than building substantive, accessible participation for communities. I argue that hackathons privilege research and development through the pursuit of “low hanging fruit,” cultivating dependence on existing platforms and their vested interests