Municipalities around the world have become increasingly reliant upon digital technologies in their everyday operations. In pursuit of a faster, cheaper, and more efficient local government, service platforms and applications that mediate citizen-government inter- actions, smart city infrastructures, and automated decision-making systems have proliferated. More recently, digital technologies are also sought to address socially complex issues and foster civic en- gagement. These ambitions, motivated by both rational and demo- cratic perspectives, however, confront many challenges such as de- signing with wide heterogeneous groups, navigating organizational structures, and dealing with the political agendas and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Designing digital technolo- gies for municipalities, therefore, requires an ability to address the technical, social, institutional, and political challenges critically, practically, and holistically. This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to (1) explore how this could be achieved and (2) map the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for designing public digital services and technologies.
Family life is no longer confined to geographically shared spaces. More often, families are separated. T echnology offers countless means of keeping families connected, which has been subject of extensive research. Yet, connection between families goes beyond interpersonal communication. Being separated from extended family means to be separated from familiar rituals, habits, and values. In this paper we present an ethnographic study of mobile families to understand how families are dealing with this kind of separation in their everyday life. We analyze situated practices and discuss how these families create a sense of connectedness to their country of origin. Our observations show that design for connectedness should address practices and materialities that are part of the family home. Furthermore, we argue that there should be more consideration for what the family connects to: Instead of connecting between people, connectedness can also be seen as staying in touch with familiar routines, customs, and environments.
Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phones such as Uber and Lyft have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how ride-sharing transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in labour issues: Changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.
HCI research on mobility and transport has been dominated by a focus on the automobile. Yet urgent environmental concerns, along with new transport technologies, have created an opportunity for new ways of thinking about how we get from A to B. App-based services, innovations in electric motors, along with changing urban transport patterns, are transforming public transit. Technology is creating new collective transit services, as well as new ways for individuals to move, such as through rental, free-floating e-scooters, so called 'micro-mobility'. This workshop seeks to discuss and establish HCI perspectives on these new mobilities - engaging with and even inventing new modes of transport, fostering collaboration between scholars with varied topical interests around mobility. We seek to bring together a group of industry and academic collaborators, bringing new competences to HCI around the exciting opportunities of redesigning our contemporary mobilities.
New technological possibilities associated with autonomous driving (AD) cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. In this article we advance a theoretical-methodological approach towards researching this context based in design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. In doing so we explain and discuss the findings of an in-car video ethnography study designed to investigate the usually unspoken and not necessarily visible elements of car-based mobility. Such an approach is needed, we argue, both in order to inform a research agenda that is capable of addressing the emergence of automated vehicles specifically, as well as in preparation for understanding the implications of automation more generally as human mobility is increasingly entangled with automated technologies and the future imaginaries associated with them.
In this article we outline and demonstrate a design anthropological approach to investigating automated mobile futures as a processual opening up of possibilities, rather than as a process of technological innovation. To undertake this we investigate the example of how the car-smartphone relationship is configuring in the contingent circumstances of the mobile present and the implications of this for automated mobile futures. Our discussion is set in the context of the growing possibility that automonous driving (AD) features are increasingly part of everyday mobilities (even if unequally distributed globally) and in which personal mobile smart technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will exist in some form and will interface with humans and be interoperable with other technologies. In developing this we draw on ethnographic understandings of how people live with the possibilities afforded by technologies in everyday life.