Fulfillment of the Work Games: Warehouse Workers’ Experiences with Algorithmic ManagementThe introduction of algorithms into a growing number of industries has restructured the landscape of work and threatens to continue. While a growing body of CSCW research has begun to document these shifts toward the future of work, relatively little is known about workers beyond the platform-mediated gig workers that have received the bulk of attention. In this paper, we turn to a traditional work sector, Amazon fulfillment centers (FC), to deepen the examination of algorithmic management on the experiences of workers. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research, we show how FC workers, when subject to labor-tracking systems and metrics in their physical work environments, react to managers’ interventions, imposed productivity rates, and the company’s treatment of them as numbers. Situating FC workers’ resistance to algorithmic systems and metrics within the current CSCW literature allows us to explicate and link the nuanced practices of FC workers to the larger discourse of algorithmic control mechanisms. In addition, we show how FC workers’ resistance practices are emblematic of ‘work games’—a long-studied means by which workers configure (“trick”) their engagement (and consent) with work systems. We argue that investigating how and to what extent workers’ resistance to algorithmic management can provide us with a more nuanced understanding of workers’ consent in the face of algorithms and expand the economic and political context in which we discuss algorithmic management.2025ECEunJeong Cheon et al.Humans vs. AI for Decision MakingCSCW
Organization Matters: A Qualitative Study of Organizational Dynamics in Red Teaming Practices For Generative AIThe rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) across diverse fields underscores the critical need for red teaming efforts to proactively identify and mitigate associated risks. While previous research primarily addresses technical aspects, this paper highlights organizational factors contributing to red teaming failures in real-world organizational settings. Through qualitative analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with red teamers from various organizations, we uncover challenges such as the marginalization of vulnerable red teamers, the invisibility of nuanced AI risks to vulnerable users until post-deployment, and a lack of user-centered red teaming approaches. These issues often arise from underlying organizational dynamics, including organizational resistance, organizational inertia, and organizational mediocracy. To mitigate these dynamics, we discuss the implications of user research for red teaming and the importance of embedding red teaming throughout the entire development cycle of GenAI systems.2025BRBixuan Ren et al.Online & AI HarmsCSCW
Back to the 1990s, BeeperRedux!: Revisiting Retro Technology to Reflect Communication Quality and Experience in the Digital AgeAs computer-mediated communication tools have evolved from beepers to 2G cell phones, and now to today's smartphones, people have consistently embraced these technologies to maintain relationships and enhance the convenience of their daily lives. However, while contemporary communication technologies clearly diverge from their traditional roles, few studies have critically examined their effects, particularly in relation to communication quality and relationships. To address what contemporary technologies may have overlooked, our study revisits retro communication technologies—specifically, the beeper. We recreated the beeper experience through BeeperRedux, a mobile application, and conducted a two-week deployment study involving ten groups. Our findings highlight three valuable aspects of retro communication technologies: fostering sincerity, restoring recipients' autonomy over their communication, and prioritizing offline engagement. In the discussion, we present design guidelines for improving technology-mediated communication and offer methodological reflections on recreating obsolete technology to empirically explore past experiences.2025JSJiyeon Amy Seo et al.University of Michigan, School of InformationSocial Platform Design & User BehaviorDesign FictionCHI
Encountering Robotic Art: The Social, Material, and Temporal Processes of Creation with MachinesRobots extend beyond the tools of productivity; they also contribute to creativity. While typically defined as utility-driven technologies designed for productive or social settings, the role of robots in creative settings remains underexplored. This paper examines how robots participate in artistic creation. Through semi-structured interviews with robotic artists, we analyze the impact of robots on artistic processes and outcomes. We identify the critical roles of social interaction, material properties, and temporal dynamics in facilitating creativity. Our findings reveal that creativity emerges from the co-constitution of artists, robots, and audiences within spatial-temporal dimensions. Based on these insights, we propose several implications for socially informed, material-attentive, and process-oriented approaches to creation with computing systems. These approaches can inform the domains of HCI, including media and art creation, craft, digital fabrication, and tangible computing.2025YQYigang Qin et al.Syracuse University, School of Information Studies3D Modeling & AnimationDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceCHI
Examining Algorithmic Metrics and their Effects through the Lens of ReactivityAlgorithmic systems that provide quantitative assessments of labor practices have proliferated in response to growing calls for accountability and transparency. Workers, according to the existing literature, are able to make sense of algorithmic metrics and even find ways to manipulate them. Human reactions like these show how metrics for tracking and measuring labor productivity can have unintended consequences, such as gaming the system, beyond the original goal of collecting accurate data on worker output. However, these metrics’ effects have not been much discussed from the perspective of reactivity. Drawing from Espeland and Sauder’s work theorizing reactivity to measures, I offer a deeper understanding of responses to algorithmic systems. Distilling three intertwined facets from their insights—quantification towards accountability, agency, and reflexivity—I frame my fieldwork findings on warehouse workers’ experiences with labor-tracking technologies. I describe the patterns of algorithmic system effects. Lastly, I explore potential design directions, viewed through the lens of reactivity.2024ECEunJeong CheonAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityAlgorithmic Transparency & AuditabilityDIS
Amazon Z to A: Speculative Design to Understand the Future of Labor-Intensive WorkplacesUnderstanding warehouse work is critical to “future of work” scholarship as warehouses are vital indicators for anticipating how work could be structured, controlled, and experienced in other data-driven workplaces in the future. However, researchers often face challenges in studying and designing interventions in such work environments, particularly ones where non-disclosure agreements and intensive, isolated, and precarious work conditions pose practical barriers to research access. By creating a set of speculative designs about warehouse work futures, we explore how speculative design techniques can be used to analyze and critically engage with on-going ethnographic research into warehouse work at Amazon fulfillment centers. These designs serve not only as a means for unpacking the logics of contemporary warehouse work but also as an approach to identify directions for worker-centered research and design in the future. This paper also provides sensibilities for using speculative design techniques to study hostile and labor-intensive work environments.2024ECEunJeong Cheon et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionField StudiesDIS
Creative Precarity in Motion: Revealing the Hidden Labor Behind Animating Virtual CharactersThis paper illuminates the obscured labor and challenges of actors—those vitalizing virtual characters through their embodied performances through motion capture (mocap) technology. Mocap in the entertainment industry has amplified the presence of virtual entities across various media platforms. Despite the expanding influence of such technologies, the mocap actors behind them often remain unseen and, at times, under-compensated. Central is the paradox where the realism and vitality of virtual characters contrast sharply with the obscured, and sometimes undervalued, human efforts behind them. We present an empirical study based on semi-structured interviews with fourteen actors, offering a nuanced understanding of their lived experiences. We highlight the multifaceted precarity they face, which includes navigating the market, preserving artistic integrity, and vulnerabilities as employees. By juxtaposing these findings with established discourses on invisible labor, we discuss three major invisibility factors. Furthermore, we propose design interventions to empower and rightfully recognize human labor.2024ECEunJeong Cheon et al.3D Modeling & AnimationTechnology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionDIS
Power in Human-Robot InteractionPower is a fundamental determinant in social interactions, yet it remains elusive in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This paper unveils the pervasive yet largely unexplored role of power in HRI by systematically investigating its varied manifestations across the HRI literature. We first introduce the definitions of power and then delve into the existing HRI literature through the lens of power, examining both the studies that directly address power and those that address power-related social configurations and concepts such as authority, dominance, and status. Leveraging Fiske’s model and French and Raven's bases of power framework, we also explore the nuances of power embedded within many HRI studies where power is not explicitly addressed. Finally, we propose power as the core concept to advance HRI---transforming fragmented existing findings into a unified theory and delineating a cohesive theoretical trajectory for future investigations. Along this line, we propose power factors and mechanisms exclusive to HRI and the need to redefine power for HRI.2024YHYoyo Tsung-Yu Hou et al.Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC)Technology Ethics & Critical HCIHRI
Powerful Futures: How a Big Tech Company Envisions Humans and Technologies in the Workplace of the FutureBig tech companies have had increasing control over how we work with technologies and how technologies define the work we do. In this paper, we identify the sociotechnical futures that Amazon—one of the big tech companies—envisions and the future of work that the company is moving toward. We explore the future of fulfillment centers through an analysis of the patents on fulfillment center technologies which Amazon may turn into reality one day. In our analysis, we focus on humans by asking how they are configured in the future of fulfillment centers and, more specifically, how Amazon envisions the role of human labor within work automation and AI systems. Our analysis reveals where and how humans are expected to “step in” to operate the future of fulfillment centers. We discuss our findings within and beyond CSCW, highlighting the importance of studying tech companies’ imaginaries. We argue that by understanding tech companies’ imaginaries, it becomes possible for us to launch effective sociotechnical interventions to negotiate or even resist their specific imaginaries and/or design ways for a more democratic uptake of companies’ future technologies. Finally, we articulate practical ways in which patents can be utilized in CSCW research.2023ECEunJeong CheonFuture of WorkCSCW
Robots as a Place for Socializing: Influences of Collaborative Robots on Social Dynamics In- and Outside the Production CellsIntroducing robots in the workplace entails new practices and configurations at the individual, organizational, and social levels. Prior work has focused on how robots may have an immediate effect on individual employees or tasks rather than their gradual influences on employees collectively or their organization over time. By drawing on fourteen in-situ interviews with six cobot operators in a Danish manufacturing company, this paper investigates how collaborative robots (cobots) in the manufacturing context may engage broader interactions beyond the robot-operator interaction. This includes spatial configurations centering around the cobots, social interactions among employees, and information flow through, within, or outside the production cell. Introducing and implementing cobots has social dynamics at its core, which we explore in-depth. This paper argues that the design of cobots and the environment around them should accommodate the possibility of more complicated social and organizational changes brought about by these robots. Lastly, we discuss research and design implications for the future of workplaces involving robots.2022ECEunJeong Cheon et al.Human-Robot InteractionCSCW
Robots as a Place for Socializing: Influences of Collaborative Robots on Social Dynamics In- and Outside the Production CellsIntroducing robots in the workplace entails new practices and configurations at the individual, organizational, and social levels. Prior work has focused on how robots may have an immediate effect on individual employees or tasks rather than their gradual influences on employees collectively or their organization over time. By drawing on fourteen in-situ interviews with six cobot operators in a Danish manufacturing company, this paper investigates how collaborative robots (cobots) in the manufacturing context may engage broader interactions beyond the robot-operator interaction. This includes spatial configurations centering around the cobots, social interactions among employees, and information flow through, within, or outside the production cell. Introducing and implementing cobots has social dynamics at its core, which we explore in-depth. This paper argues that the design of cobots and the environment around them should accommodate the possibility of more complicated social and organizational changes brought about by these robots. Lastly, we discuss research and design implications for the future of workplaces involving robots.2022ECEunJeong Cheon et al.Human-Robot InteractionCSCW
Working with Bounded Collaboration: A Qualitative Study on how Collaboration is Co-constructed around Collaborative Robots in IndustryWe investigate how collaboration is understood and configured in industrial workplaces with collaborative robots (cobots). Through a qualitative analysis of 115 case studies of companies using cobots and 14 semi-structured interviews with cobot manufacturers and users, we examine the usages of cobots in the manufacturing industry over the entire temporal spectrum from pre-introduction to completed implementation. By synthesizing diverse stakeholders' perspectives, we present a set of main findings; key roles of a few supportive production workers during the adoption of cobots; a fragmentation of work tasks and the resulting loss of job identity among workers; the disunified meaning of ``collaboration'' which is under constant development; and the collaborative space and the working rhythms between production workers and cobots. By reconsidering what collaboration means in the workplace with cobots, we propose the concept of \textit{bounded collaboration}, which means that the anticipated collaboration is manifested in a partial and limited manner within a collaborative technology. Finally, we provide practical suggestions for examining and supporting organizations and users in their adoption of cobots.2022ECEunJeong Cheon et al.Human-Robot Interaction; Human-Robot InteractionCSCW