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.

We report on the lessons we learned on programming human-drone interactions during a three-day challenge where five teams of drone novices each programmed a nanodrone to be piloted through an obstacle course using bodily movement. Center to the participants' learning process was the eventual shift from the deceptively simple idea of seamless human-drone interactions, to the reality of drones as non-predictable systems prone to crashes. This happened as participants had to first realize, then to deal with the limitations of the drone's resource-constrained hardware. Coping with these limitations was crucially complicated by the lack of appropriate programming abstractions, which led participants to focus on plenty of low-level, sometimes immaterial details, while losing focus on the ultimate objectives. We find concrete evidence of these observations in how participants handled the visibility problem in debugging drone behaviors, applied different defensive coding techniques, and altered their piloting practice. Our insights may inform further research efforts in drone programming, especially in the vastly uncharted territory of human-drone interactions.

In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human–drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge, we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore their aesthetic potential. Through a bricolage approach to analysing interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team’s code, we describe how teams 1) shifted their efforts from aiming for seamless human–drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaged with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely probe, understand and define their drone’s capabilities; 3) adopted different workaround strategies, emphasising either training the drone or the pilot. We contribute an empirical account of constraints in shaping the potential aesthetics of drone behaviour, and discuss how programming environments could better support somaesthetic perception–action loops for design and programming purposes.

This thesis examines mundane practices of everyday phone use to make conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions to ongoing research on mobile technology. It argues that we do not yet have a clear understanding of how the mobile phone is used–who does what, when and why. Yet these details are important if we are to judge the impact of mobile technology, understand the possibilities and dangers it offers, or evaluate claims about its broader impact on our sociality.

The participation of both the phone user and those co-located is examined–to understand how we actively create and maintain a new ‘social order’ with mobile phones. Across five separate studies, a mix of methods is used to look closely at phone use. Drawing extensively on in situ video recording of device use, as well as interviews and ethnographic observations, the empirical chapters cover three different types of device use: search, messaging, and way-finding. The chapters look at the specifics of how the applications manifest themselves in practice (such as message notifications, or the ‘blue dot’ in map apps), as well as the practices adopted to use, manage and balance those applications within ongoing co-located, face-to-face interactions.

Empirically, the studies document how co-located phone use is dependent upon the technology, but is also reliant upon new practices of collaboration and co-operation. I discuss how participation is managed (who is involved), the temporal organisation of action (when use occurs), and the recurrent actions and materiality of those practices (what happens). Moment-by-moment analysis of the practices highlights the importance and value of making phone use publicly accountable to avoid disturbing the ‘local order’, but also for sharing knowledge and making sense of the world together, as well as having fun and maintaining friendships.

The methodological contribution is found in the hybridity of methods adopted to meet the challenge of collecting and analysing data relevant to studying what is happening when we use our phones. A combination of ethnography with video and conversation analysis, and the creative use of probes to support interviews is proposed, to gain access to a broader perspective on phone use. Through reliance upon empirical observation, we can avoid abstract and reductive generalisations about phone use, discussing instead the observable action and resources that do occur recurrently around mobile phone use–how things get done with mobiles.

Conceptually, the thesis draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis for a perspective on how we make sense of the day-to-day interactions we have with one another–how we bring about and sustain the ‘local’ social order. I argue that practices of mobile phone use are constituent parts of local order in everyday life, and that their examination is key to understanding what social order is now like. A conceptual ‘diamond’ of mobile phone practice, broken down into elements of time, body, materiality, and repair is proposed. In conclusion, the thesis highlights the prevalence of phone practices beyond individual, task-oriented pursuits and I finish by reflecting on possible future research to enhance the collaborative, social aspects of mobile technology.

In this paper, we examine how two chat apps fit into the communication ecosystem of six large distributed enterprises, in India and Kenya. From the perspective of management, these chat apps promised to foster greater communication and awareness between workers in the field, and between fieldworkers and the enterprises administration and management centres. Each organisation had multiple different types of chat groups, characterised by the types of content and interaction patterns they mediate, and the different organisational functions they fulfil. Examining the interplay between chat and existing local practices for coordination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we discuss how chat manifests in the distributed workplace and how it fits – or otherwise – alongside the rhythms of both local and remote work. We contribute to understandings of chat apps for workplace communication and provide insights for shaping their ongoing development.

Cooperatives are member-owned organisations, run for the common benefit of their members. While cooperatives are a longstanding way of organising, they have received little attention in CSCW. In this paper, through interviews with 26 individuals from 24 different cooperatives, our focus is an exploratory inquiry on how cooperatives could expand thinking into what future economies can look like and the part technologies may play in them. We discuss (1) the work to make the co-op work, that is, the special effort involved in managing an enterprise in a democratic and inclusive way, (2) the multiple purposes that cooperatives can serve for their members, well beyond financial benefit, and (3) ICT usage within cooperatives as a site of tension and dialogue. We conclude by discussing the meaning and measures of success in alternative economies, and lessons learned for CSCW scholarship on civic and societal organisations.

While lightweight text messaging applications have been researched extensively, new messaging applications such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Snapchat offer some new functionality and potential uses. Moreover, the role messaging plays in interaction and talk with those who are co-present has been neglected. In this article, we draw upon a corpus of naturalistic recordings of text message reading and composition to document the face-to-face life of text messages. Messages, both sent and received, share similarities with reported speech in conversation; they can become topical resource for local conversation-supporting verbatim reading aloud or adaptive summaries. Yet with text messages, their verifiability creates a distinctive resource. Similarly, in message composition, what to write may be discussed with collocated others. We conclude with discussion of designs for messaging in both face-to-face, and remote, communication.

Pedestrians do not just walk. They rush, they dawdle, they stroll, they amble, they circle, they pause, they stop, they edge past, they saunter, they plod, they advance, they retreat, they backtrack, they lead, they follow. Walking happens as a host of more prepositional, intentional and consequential actions: they walk towards, they walk away, they walk off, they walk into. Nor do pedestrians make naked contact with the places where they are walking: hiking shoes protect their feet while hillwalking, price tags and labels shape their trajectory while shopping, podcasts envelope them in comic dialogues while they walk to work.

Personal assistants using a command-dialogue model of speech recognition, such as Siri and Cortana, have become increasingly powerful and popular for individual use. In this paper we explore whether similar techniques could be used to create a speech-based agent system which, in a group meeting setting, would similarly monitor spoken dialogue, pro-actively detect useful actions, and carry out those actions without specific commands being spoken. Using a low-fi technical probe, we investigated how such a system might perform in the collaborative work setting and how users might respond to it. We recorded and transcribed a varied set of nine meetings from which we generated simulated lists of automated ‘action items’, which we then asked the meeting participants to review retrospectively. The low rankings given on these discovered items are suggestive of the difficulty in applying personal assistant technology to the group setting, and we document the issues emerging from the study. Through observations, we explored the nature of meetings and the challenges they present for speech agents.

Drawing on 168 hours of video recordings of smartwatch use, this paper studies how context influences smartwatch use. We explore the effects of the presence of others, activity, location and time of day on 1,009 instances of use. Watch interaction is significantly shorter when in conversation than when alone. Activity also influences watch use with significantly longer use while eating than when socialising or performing domestic tasks. One surprising finding is that length of use is similar at home and work. We note that usage peaks around lunchtime, with an average of 5.3 watch uses per hour throughout a day. We supplement these findings with qualitative analysis of the videos, focusing on how use is modified by the presence of others, and the lack of impact of watch glances on conversation. Watch use is clearly a context-sensitive activity and in discussion we explore how smartwatches could be designed taking this into consideration.