Sleep-tracking technology is built into many available smart technologies and wearables; hence, designing for and with these data requires a broad understanding of the user and their relation to sleep. However, these technologies still focus on traditional 7–9 hours-per-night schedules – overlooking the varied nature of people's sleep – and focus on metrics that are difficult to influence, such as sleep stages, making them unactionable for a large portion of the users. This dissertation investigates what sleep tracking can do for users who put effort into managing sleep by studying what actions and challenges they already employ. Using qualitative methods and design approaches, I study how people `hack' their sleep,  the difficulties that arise from non-traditional sleep patterns, and how sleep technology is used in everyday life. The findings and contributions of this work include (1) rich descriptions of these participants, in terms of how they share and discuss sleep hacks in online communities, and insights and reflections on the social factors of sleeping outside normal hours; (2) design explorations of how sleep tracking technology could be built to support these practices; and (3) framing self-tracking technology as the design of the self – to design technology that centres on the actions and varying goals and bodies of the users. In the discussion, I discuss how this work relates the notions of bodies and users in human-computer interaction, how changes in modern work arrangements call for new technology to support the arrangement of sleep and life rhythms, and reflections on the norms and soft paternalism of sleep tracking technologies.

The thesis examines the work practice of platform-mediated food delivery. Combining ethnographic studies in India and Sweden, it highlights the friction between the platform’s representation of work and the ground realities shaping workers’ situated actions, including their economic concerns. The thesis contributes to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, with an emphasis on worker-centered design and the critical role of human labor in gig work.