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.

Sleep takes one-third of our life and is of increasing technological interest. Yet development has been focused on the traditional notion of 8 hours-per-night schedules of good sleep' - overlooking the varied nature of people's sleeping and waking practices. Based on the experiences of Shift Workers, Gamers, and Polyphasic Sleepers, this paper exposes the sleep practices of extreme sleepers for the design of technology. This cohort follows sleep patterns outwith those encoded in current technology for work, will and well-being. Through interviews and design workshops, we present three themes emerging from these perspectives on sleep. These themes revolve around the physiological, felt, and social timings of sleep. We explore a design space around these themes through eight different critical design exemplars. In conclusion, this work encourages the design of sleep technology focusing on users' agency over their own life-rhythms rather than pre-built concepts of good' sleep.

With the increasing adoption of body tracking technology, users are able to collect bio-data which designers struggle to make legible or actionable. This work focused on increasing this technology-mediated bodily understanding through exploring the material properties of the body rhythms that govern the sleep behaviours being tracked. Building from a workshop with non-normative sleepers, we reframe sleep tracking to be about understanding and manipulating body rhythms. We explore these rhythms through the RtD process of designing the Awari alertness-forecast and scheduling application in four iterations. This resulted in three non-exclusive categories of rhythmic influence: Slow & Cyclical, Pressure & Release, and Anchored. Through a better understanding of how they interact, their inertia, and their material properties for interaction we encourage the design of technology to shape, and be shaped, by the complex rhythms of life. We discuss ways in which this can democratise medical-models, and make actionable complex bodily processes.

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.