Workers Who Care: AI-Enabled Smart Hand Tools in the Skilled Trades

This paper seeks to encourage the human-centered development of workplace technologies by demonstrating how care can inform the design of AI-based systems. The paper builds upon the ethics of care from feminist theory as well as from HCI and CSCW scholarship to foreground the interconnection between technology, those who use technology, and expressions of care in the workplace. Qualitative field research involving skilled trade workers and smart hand tool design provides evidence of how care can influence technology design and how socio-technical interventions can enable expressions of care related to safety, training, and effective tool use. The paper expands the feminist consideration of care to include skilled trade workers and showcases their potential role as co-designers of socio-technical interventions. The paper concludes by recommending further research that can expand upon these emergent concepts and lead to further collaborations that benefit socio-technical system design and the evolution of AI related to the future of work in the skilled trades.