Positive Work Practices. Opportunities and Challenges in Designing Meaningful Work-related Technology

Work is a rich source of meaning. However, beyond organizational changes, most approaches in the research field of Meaningful Work neglected the power of work-related technology to increase meaning. Using two cases as examples, this paper proposes a wellbeing-driven approach to the design of work-related technology. Despite the positive results of our cases, we argue that the use of technology as a means of increasing meaning in the workplace is still in its infancy.Comment: 5 pages, to be published in Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Understanding and Designing Automation with Peoples' Wellbeing in Mind

Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation relieves us from many daily household chores - robots vacuum floors and automated coffeemakers produce supposedly barista-quality coffee on the press of a button. In many cases these offers are embraced by people without further questioning. Of course, automation frees us from many unloved activities, but we may also lose something by delegating more and more everyday activities to automation. In a series of four studies, we explored the experiential costs of everyday automation and strategies of how to design technology to reconcile experience with the advantages of ever more powerful automation.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

LoopBoxes -- Evaluation of a Collaborative Accessible Digital Musical Instrument

LoopBoxes is an accessible digital musical instrument designed to create an intuitive access to loop based music making for children with special educational needs (SEN). This paper describes the evaluation of the instrument in the form of a pilot study during a music festival in Berlin, Germany, as well as a case study with children and music teachers in a SEN school setting. We created a modular system composed of three modules that afford single user as well as collaborative music making. The pilot study was evaluated using informal observation and questionnaires (n = 39), and indicated that the instrument affords music making for people with and without prior musical knowledge across all age groups and fosters collaborative musical processes. The case study was based on observation and a qualitative interview. It confirmed that the instrument meets the needs of the school settings and indicated how future versions could expand access to all students, especially those experiencing complex disabilities. In addition, out-of-the-box functionality seems to be crucial for the long-term implementation of the instrument in a school setting.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME'23

Ein pflegekräftezentrierter Ansatz der Computer-gestützten Schichtplanung im Gesundheitswesen

Nurse shift planning is a central work organization process in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. The shift plan provides a frame for all further healthcare activities by regulating staffing levels and group compositions at all times and on each day of the week. In addition, it fundamentally shapes each individual nurse’s life, often disturbs their circadian rhythms, and limits their ability to organize social activities. As a result, shift planning often brings challenges for nurses' physical and psychological health, and it can reduce their subjective well-being. There is a long history of research on how to improve the shift planning process, with two contrasting approaches. The first approach focuses on efficiency and full automation of the shift planning process. Its central motivation is that more efficient shift planning may free time and resources that can be used for other healthcare tasks, and that it helps to optimize staffing levels to meet the demand. A downside is that it excludes nurses from the planning process and reduces direct control of their shift plans, which creates work-life conflicts that negatively affect their well-being. The second approach gives full control of the shift plan to the nurses. This allows them to better integrate their work and private lives, but it can be inefficient and substantially increase workload for nurses, particularly in larger groups. This thesis presents the design and evaluation of an approach to shift planning that attempts to combine the best of both worlds, but with a focus on the nurses' perspective. The research followed a nurse-centered design process, focusing specifically on subjective fairness and subjective well-being from the perspective of the nurses affected by shift planning. In addition, automatic processes were included if they did not interfere with the primary goal to create a shift planning system that promotes nurses' fairness and well-being. The empirical section covers five studies. In Studies 1 and 2, we investigated nurses' subjective fairness experiences in the context of shift planning. Nurses understood fairness as equality (“everyone is treated equally”) for the general distribution of resources, such as free weekends. But in concrete planning decisions about free shifts, they understood fairness based on individual needs (“the person with a greater need gets the day off”), which has fundamental implications for how fair conflict resolution should be designed. In addition, nurses experienced involvement in the decision-making process as a central facet of fairness (i.e., procedural fairness). Study 3 covers the conceptual design of a nurse-centered shift planning system with the goal to promote subjective fairness and subjective well-being, based on interview studies with nurses and healthcare planners. Study 4 describes a nine-month appropriation study of a prototypical shift planning system that followed this conceptual design, in a ward of a retirement community. We found that some nurses used the system regularly for planning, but others did not. These differences were partially based on different lifestyles (e.g., planning months ahead vs. not planning the next week) and social considerations (e.g., preserving the reputation as a reliable and hard-working colleague). We also identified informal conflict negotiation practices (e.g., rescheduling private events, sharing shifts), informal functions of leadership (e.g., “pushing” colleagues to take time for themselves), and implications of the shift plan's release date on nurses' ability to plan for their private lives. Finally, in Study 5 we compared the informal conflict negotiation practices identified in Study 4 with an alternative, fully automated conflict resolution process. The interactive version had positive effects on fairness, well-being, and team spirit

Context factors for pro-social practices in health care

In order to reduce the shortage of healthcare workers, researchers try to find ways to improve nurses’ job conditions. A lot of effort concentrates on organizing shift work in a more agreeable way by providing more autonomy to the nurses, e.g., through self scheduling. However, increased autonomy also means that nurses have to resolve scheduling conflicts within the team. To that end, a good team coherence is essential. In this brief exploratory study we present the pro-social practices of three Japanese nurses, each one working in a different setting that brings specific opportunities for pro-sociality. The findings can serve as a starting point for more focused, context-specific studies on pro-sociality in outpatient, residential, or day care

On Appropriation and Nostalgic Reminiscence of Technology

Technological objects present themselves as necessary, only to become obsolete faster than ever before. This phenomenon has led to a population that experiences a plethora of technological objects and interfaces as they age, which become associated with certain stages of life and disappear thereafter. Noting the expanding body of literature within HCI about appropriation, our work pinpoints an area that needs more attention, “outdated technologies.” In other words, we assert that design practices can profit as much from imaginaries of the future as they can from reassessing artefacts from the past in a critical way. In a two-week fieldwork with 37 HCI students, we gathered an international collection of nostalgic devices from 14 different countries to investigate what memories people still have of older technologies and the ways in which these memories reveal normative and accidental use of technological objects. We found that participants primarily remembered older technologies with positive connotations and shared memories of how they had adapted and appropriated these technologies, rather than normative uses. We refer to this phenomenon as nostalgic reminiscence. In the future, we would like to develop this concept further by discussing how nostalgic reminiscence can be operationalized to stimulate speculative design in the present

Technology-Mediated Experiences and Social Context

Technologies, such as smartphones or wearables, take a central role in our daily lives. Making their use meaningful and enjoyable requires a better understanding of the prerequisites and underpinnings of positive experiences with such technologies. So far, a focus had been on the users themselves, that is, their individual goals, desires, feelings, and acceptance. However, technology is often used in a social context, observed by others or even used in interaction with others, and thus shapes social dynamics considerably. In the present paper, we start from the notion that meaningful and/or enjoyable experiences (i.e., wellbeing) are a major outcome of technology use. We investigate how these experiences are further shaped by social context, such as potential spectators. More specifically, we gathered private (while being alone) and public (while other people are present) positive experiences with technology and compared need fulfillment and affective experience. In addition, we asked participants to imagine a change in context (from private to public or public to private) and to report the impact of this change on experience. Results support the idea of particular social needs, such as relatedness and popularity, which are especially relevant and better fulfilled in public than in private contexts. Moreover, our findings show that participants experience less positive affect when imaginatively removing the present others from a formerly public interaction, i.e., when they imagine performing the same interaction but without the other people present. Overall, this underlines the importance of social context for Human-Computer Interaction practice and research. Practical implications relate to product development, e.g., designing interactive technologies that can adapt to context (changes) or allow for context-sensitive interaction sets. We discuss limitations related to the experimental exploration of social context, such as the method of data collection, as well as potential alternatives to address those limitations, such as diary studies