"It's Messy...But I Feel Balanced": Unpacking Flexible Worker's Rhythm-Making Practices Using Asset-Based Approach

Paper Title

"It's Messy...But I Feel Balanced': Unpacking Flexible Worker's Rhythm-Making Practices Using Asset-Based Approach"

Publication Info

• Topic area: Flexible work arrangements and caregiving responsibilities in HCI.
• Keywords: Flexible work, caregiving, work-life balance, rhythm-making, asset-based approach, blurred boundaries, human infrastructure, relational assets, temporal assets, intrapersonal strategies.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: HCI research has largely focused on productivity and organizational perspectives of flexible work, neglecting its intersection with caregiving and domestic responsibilities. This oversight risks ignoring the invisible efforts required to sustain flexible work and caregiving roles.
• Significance: Flexible work arrangements are increasingly essential as caregiving demands rise due to demographic changes. Understanding how workers navigate these dual roles is critical for designing technologies that support sustainable work-life balance.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have explored boundary work and flexible work technologies but often reinforce segmentation-integration binaries. These approaches fail to account for the fluid and relational dimensions of work-care rhythms, leaving gaps in understanding how caregiving responsibilities shape flexible work practices.

Solution

• Proposed approach: An asset-based lens to examine how flexible workers manage caregiving and work responsibilities through rhythm-making practices.
• Novelty:
  1. Reframing blurred boundaries as resources for sustaining rhythms rather than disruptions.
  2. Extending boundary work literature with an asset-based perspective that highlights invisible practices and values.
  3. Proposing design implications for technologies that support rhythm-making as an ongoing practice.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a qualitative study with 20 participants in Singapore using design probes and semi-structured interviews.
  • Analyzed participants’ strategies for maintaining, negotiating, and sustaining rhythms through temporal, spatial, relational, institutional, and intrapersonal assets.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants leveraged blurred boundaries as critical assets for aligning caregiving and work priorities.
  • Temporal strategies included adaptive multitasking, leveraging pockets of time, and long-term career trade-offs.
  • Relational coordination within households and workplaces was essential for sustaining rhythms.
  • Intrapersonal strategies such as micro-boundary practices, screen-based media use, and cultivating positive inner orientations supported emotional resilience.
• Advantage over baselines: Challenges traditional productivity-focused systems by emphasizing the value of fluid, interleaved rhythms and invisible articulation work.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants were recruited based on flexible work and caregiving criteria.
  • Data collection included design probes to capture lived experiences and semi-structured interviews for deeper contextual insights.
  • Analysis applied constructivist grounded theory and situational analysis to examine rhythm-making practices.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Findings are shaped by the Singapore context, limiting transferability to other cultural and policy environments.
  • Over-representation of female participants highlights gendered caregiving dynamics.
  • Future research should explore population-specific inquiries, in-home ethnography, and perspectives of live-in domestic workers.

Summary

This study explores how flexible workers in caregiving contexts sustain work-life rhythms by leveraging temporal, spatial, relational, institutional, and intrapersonal assets. It reframes blurred boundaries as resources for adaptability and resilience rather than disruptions. Findings emphasize the collective and structural nature of rhythm-making, challenging productivity-focused systems and offering design implications for technologies that support fluid, interleaved practices. Future research should address underrepresented subpopulations and structural inequalities to develop equitable policies and tools for flexible work arrangements.