Search for: All records

California’s agricultural workers are a vulnerable population due to their undocumented status and poor working conditions. This paper describes community engagement with NGO workers, farm laborers, and farm owners to identify and address the effects of climate change, namely heat stress, on, strawberry field workers. We deployed personal informatics devices in a longitudinal study with three field workers for a month and a half and presented the collected statistics back to them, asking them to reflect on their personal health (e.g., exposure to heat stress) and work data. We found that field workers normalized grit - the irregularity, adversity, competitiveness, and helplessness of their labor - thereby limiting the promise of personal informatics to help users lead healthier lives. Implicitly, personal informatics supports white collar workers such as information workers; overall, however, our study suggests a mismatch between current designs and front-line work which involve intensive physical work requirements. 

Technology for outdoor recreation, like the hiking app AllTrails, can improve access and safety for hikers. However, these tools can also negatively impact hikers on the trail, for example, by distracting them from experiencing nature. Using the walkthrough method, we critically evaluate the hiking app AllTrails to uncover implicit values underlying the app’s design and features, using a body-inclusive lens inspired by the community group Fat Girls Hiking. We found that AllTrails subtly nudges users towards a more fitness-oriented approach to hiking. This orientation may negatively impact novice hikers and those who are already marginalized in the hiking industry and we suggest alternative designs that could promote greater inclusivity. 

Trained and optimized for typical and fluent speech, speech AI works poorly for people with speech diversities, often interrupting them and misinterpreting their speech. The increasing deployment of speech AI in automated phone menus, AI-conducted job interviews, and everyday devices poses tangible risks to people with speech diversities. To mitigate these risks, this workshop aims to build a multidisciplinary coalition and set the research agenda for fair and accessible speech AI. Bringing together a broad group of academics and practitioners with diverse perspectives, including HCI, AI, and other relevant fields such as disability studies, speech language pathology, and law, this workshop will establish a shared understanding of the technical challenges for fair and accessible speech AI, as well as its ramifications in design, user experience, policy, and society. In addition, the workshop will invite and highlight first-person accounts from people with speech diversities, facilitating direct dialogues and collaboration between speech AI developers and the impacted communities. The key outcomes of this workshop include a summary paper that synthesizes our learnings and outlines the roadmap for improving speech AI for people with speech diversities, as well as a community of scholars, practitioners, activists, and policy makers interested in driving progress in this domain. 

Much research on older people with memory concerns is focused on tracking and informed by the priorities of others. In this paper, we seek to understand the potential that people with memory concerns see in tracking. We conducted interviews with 29 participants with concerns about their memory and engaged in an affective writing approach. We find a range of potentials that can be traced to how participants are already self-tracking. Emotions associated with these potentials vary: from acceptance to resistance, and positive anticipation to aversion. Participants are emotionally motivated to foreclose possibilities in some instances and keep them open in others. While individual and unique, potential is structured by forces that include individual routines, relationships with others, and macro-level institutions and cultural contexts. We reflect on these findings in the context of research on self-tracking with older adults, designing with ambiguity, and forces that structure the experience of living with memory concerns. 

Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work. 

Recent years have seen increased investment in data-driven farming through the use of sensors (hardware), algorithms (software), and networking technologies to guide decision making. By analyzing the discourse of 34 startup company websites, we identify four future visions promoted by data-driven farming startups: the vigilant farmer who controls all aspects of her farm through data; the efficient farmer who has optimized his farm operations to be profitable and sustainable; the enlightened farmer who achieves harmony with nature via data-driven insights; and the empowered farmer who asserts ownership of her farm's data, and uses it to benefit herself and her fellow farmers. We describe each of these visions and how startups propose to achieve them. We then consider some consequences of these visions; in particular, how they might affect power relations between the farmer and other stakeholders in agriculture--farm workers, nonhumans, and the technology providers themselves. 

Menopause is a major life change affecting roughly half of the population, resulting in physiological, emotional, and social changes. To understand experiences with menopause holistically, we conducted a study of a subreddit forum. The project was informed by feminist social science methodologies, which center knowledge production on women's lived experiences. Our central finding is that the lived experience of menopause is social: menopause is less about bodily experiences by themselves and more about how experiences with the body become meaningful over time in the social context. We find that gendered marginalization shapes diverse social relationships, leading to widespread feelings of alienation and negative transformation - often expressed in semantically dense figurative language. Research and design can accordingly address menopause not only as a women's health concern, but also as a matter of facilitating social support and a social justice issue.