The concept of ‘bodywork´ refers to the work individuals undertake on their own bodies and the bodies of others. One aspect is attending to bodily needs, which is often overlooked in the workplace and HCI/CSCW research on work practices. Yet, this labour can be a significant barrier to work, consequential to work, and prone to spill over into other aspects of life. We present three empirical cases of bodywork: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and office-based knowledge work. We describe what attending to bodily needs at work entails and illustrate tactics employed so that work can be carried on, even when the body (or technology optimising it) breaks down. Arguing that all systems are bodily systems, we conclude with a call to acknowledge the centrality of bodies in all work and the roles technologies can play in supporting or constraining bodywork differently for different workers.

Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work.

This paper analyzes honks directed at autonomous vehicles (AVs) by other drivers. As honks often mark problems, this focus allows us to better understand the challenges that AVs face in real traffic. Performing a sequential video analysis of 63 honk incidents uploaded by Tesla beta testers on YouTube, we identify how problematic situations emerge as honkable Traffic Gestalts. We identify four types of situated problems with AV driving performance marked by other drivers' honks: They may wait too long, steer inconsistently, stop instead of going, and go too fast. We further show how a honk may be understandable as a warning, a nudge or a reprimand. Our work suggests designing honks for AVs to focus on relevant contexts, supported by developing bidirectional interfaces and audio analysis methods that consider the interplay of auditory and visual information in traffic.

Food delivery platforms are location-based services that rely on minimal, quantifiable data points, such as GPS location, to represent and manage labor. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of food delivery work in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the challenges gig workers face when working with a platform that uses their (phone’s) GPS location to monitor and control their movement. Further, we describe how these, along with the platform’s opaque, location-based logics, shape the delivery workflow. We also document how the platform selectively represented workers’ bodies during the pandemic to portray them as safe and sterile, describing workers’ tactics in responding to issues arising from asymmetric platform policies. In discussion, we consider what we can learn from understanding gig workers as ‘infrastructure’, commonly overlooked but visible upon breakdown. We conclude by reflecting on how we might center gig workers’ well-being and bodily needs in design.

The advent of autonomous cars creates a range of new questions about road safety, as well as a new collaborative domain for CSCW to analyse. This paper uses video data collected from five countries - India, Spain, France, Chile, and the USA - to study how road users interact with each other. We use interactional video analysis to document how co-ordination is achieved in traffic not just through the use of formal rules, but through situated communicative action. Human movement is a rich implicit communication channel and this communication is essential for safe manoeuvring on the road, such as in the co-ordination between pedestrians and drivers. We discuss five basic movements elements: gaps, speed, position, indicating and stopping. Together these elements can be combined to make and accept offers, show urgency, make requests and display preferences. We build on these results to explore lessons for how we can design the implicit motion of self-driving cars so that these motions are understandable - in traffic - by other road users. In discussion, we explore the lessons from this for designing the movement of robotic systems more broadly.

Using publicly uploaded videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars, this paper documents how self-driving vehicles still struggle with some basics of road interaction. To drive safely self-driving cars need to interact in traffic with other road users. Yet traffic is a complex, long established social domain. We focus on one core element of road interaction: when road users yield for each other. Yielding – such as by slowing down for others in traffic – involves communication between different road users to decide who will ‘go’ and who will ‘yield’. Videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars show how these systems fail to both yield for others, as well as failing to go when yielded to. In discussion, we explore how these ‘problems’ illustrate both the complexity of designing for road interaction, but also how the space of physical machine/human social interactions more broadly can be designed for.

This paper considers food delivery work as a form of piecework that is conducted via a particular workflow system -- the food delivery platform and its delivery app. We offer an ethnographic account of food delivery labor during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian city of Pune. Our inquiry is focused on (1) the workflow that structures food delivery work and (2) how economic considerations shape how workers work with and around the workflow. Our findings depict both the workflow that structures the delivery work and the efforts workers make beyond it to deal with contingencies and unexpected requirements they encounter on the ground. We recognize the workers' efforts as essential to make the workflow work but also to make the piecework arrangement work for them. We highlight how, in this setting, money is not just the motivation for engaging in gig work; rather, economic considerations infuse every aspect of the work process. Acknowledging the distinct shape gig work takes in a Global South context, our study highlights the value of in-depth,in situ understandings of how gig workers' economic considerations are entangled with their interactions with the technology that structures their work. Our key contribution lies in mapping outthe workflow of piecework andthe work to make piecework work, specifically in a Global South setting, by drawing upon classic CSCW themes around workflows and piecework to strengthen the contemporary scholarly discussion concerning gig work.

With growing interest in how technology can make sense of our body and bodily experiences, this work looks at how these experiences are communicated through and with the help of technology. We present the ways in which knowledge about sleep, and how to manipulate it, is collectively shared online. This paper documents the sleep-change practices of four groups of 'Sleep Hackers' including Nurses, Polyphasic Sleeper, Over-sleepers, and Biohackers. Our thematic analysis uses 1002 posts taken from public forums discussing sleep change. This work reveals the different ways individuals share their experiences and build communal knowledge on how to 'hack' their sleep -- from using drugs, external stimulation, isolation, and polyphasic sleeping practices where segmented sleep schedules are shared between peers. We describe how communal discussions around the body and sleep can inform the development of body sensing technology. We discuss the opportunities and implications for designing for bodily agency over sleep changes both in relation to collaboratively developed understandings of the body and social context of the user. We also discuss notions of slowly changing bodily processes and sensory manipulation in relation to how they can build on the exploration of soma-technology.

It is often assumed that the interests of users and developers coincide, sharing a common goal of good design. Yet users often desire functionality that goes beyond what designers, and the organisations they work in, are willing to supply. Analysing online forums, complemented with interviews, we document how users, hackers and software developers worked together to discover and apply system exploits in hardware and software. We cover four cases: users of CPAP breathing assistance machines getting access to their own sleep data, 'hacking' the Nintendo switch game console to run non-authorised software, end-users building their own insulin supply system, and farmers repairing their own agriculture equipment against suppliers terms and conditions. We propose the concept of the 'gulf of interests' to understand how differing interests can create conflicts between end-users, designers, and the organisations they work in. This points us in the direction of researching further the political and economic situations of technology development and use.

Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how participants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each displaying participants' online understanding of the instructions and different articulations between demonstrations and practical task: pausing to raise a correspondence problem, to keep up with the video, and to turn to action. From this exemplar case, we discuss how ordinary people experience and make time with interactive media.