Major Research Projects

Understanding the Present and Designing the Future of Risk Prediction (2022-2025)

Collaborators:
Yunan Chen, Professor, UCI
Kathleen Pine, Associate Professor, Arizona State University
Mauricio Mejia, Associate Professor, Arizona State University
Myeong Lee, Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Rachel Warren, Doctoral Student, UCI
NSF #2211360

This research will develop and design new data-driven risk prediction principles and management (DDRPM) tools that anticipate and manage a variety of community risks, which fire departments are increasingly required to respond to, including medical, fire, and safety emergencies. Today, much of their work focuses on community risk reduction (CRR), a paradigm that seeks to mitigate risks before they lead to emergencies in the first place. The CRR paradigm will leverage new data-driven risk prediction and management (DDRPM) tools to predict and respond to a variety of community risks. Yet, designing DDRPM tools to realize this vision requires deep understanding of current work practices, and the potential future impacts of such tools on labor (e.g., increased data work), workers (e.g., decreased autonomy), and communities (e.g., intensified surveillance of marginalized populations). Understanding the intersection of sociotechnical work practices for handling risks and the design of data-driven computational tools requires fundamental human-centered computing research. The fire service is key to the health, safety, and security of individuals, communities, and society; thus, this research is primed to provide lasting, practical benefits. This project will directly benefit the study sites and the populations they serve since insights drawn from ethnographic research will be disseminated to study sites and participants.

This project has multiple goals: (1) comprehensive empirical exploration of community-oriented risk work performed by fire personnel and their associated data work, (2) development of a human-centered design process for the future of DDRPM tools, (3) co-designing speculative DDRPM tools with fire departments, and (4) developing a sociotechnical theory of risk work. It will achieve these goals in three phases. First, it will document current practices of community-focused risk work and community data resources using in-depth ethnographic research in three fire departments. The ethnographic data will be leveraged as part of a novel human-centered design process that combines ethnography, inquiry through design, participatory design, and speculative design. Second, the team of researchers will co-design speculative prototypes for DDRPM in partnership with the study participants. This methodological approach will fill a crucial gap in research and design of sustainable data-driven tools for risk handling by enabling consideration of impacts of design of DDRPM tools on future work practices in the fire service and on communities. Third, the team will evaluate the resulting speculative prototypes to understand how they shift visions of technologically-supported community risk work for the fire service. Both the design process and the co-designed prototypes will be disseminated to the fire service professional community.

Augmentation for Tomorrow: Expanding the Future Capacities of Independent Workers (2020-2023)

Collaborators:
Ingrid Erickson, Assistant Professor, Syracuse
Maggie Jack, Post Doctoral Scholar, Syracuse
Charis Owuraku Asante-Agye, Doctoral Student, Syracuse
NSF #1928573

Technological advancements are changing how people work, what they are able to accomplish, and what they imagine to be possible. One aim of these advancements has long been to augment workers’ capacities. However, these efforts have often focused narrowly on improving productivity and safety rather than enhancing personal well-being or creativity. This research promotes the idea that technology -- if well designed -- can support workers’ needs holistically, and only in embracing this approach can we design sustainable human/technology partnerships for the future. During this three year study, the investigators will collaborate with independent knowledge workers, who we define as individuals who engage in knowledge work (i.e., media, law, scholarship) and are not full-time employees in traditional organizations. These workers often enjoy the freedom to organize their work relative to a variety of factors. However, as part of this freedom, they often feel pressure to effectively manage tasks, time, clients, collaborators, finances, reputations, and multiple  non-professional aspects of their lives on their own. Given their situation, independent knowledge workers are an ideal population in which to identify innovative technological strategies that are at the vanguard of enhancing human capacity. By attending to how this population integrates work, family, home, volunteer responsibilities, and other pursuits into their daily lives, this research will provide design inspiration for ensuring a more humane work experience in the future and inform related policy, infrastructure, and training discussions. 

Examining the ‘class ceiling’ in big tech (2019-2022)

Collaborators:
Sharon Koppman, Associate Professor, UCI
Phoebe Chua, Doctoral Student, UCI
NSF #1920529

In order to better understand the class ceiling for STEM professionals this study examines the application and hiring process for elite internships. Internships in Big Tech (e.g. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) are a direct path to economic prosperity. Not only are research interns paid well while they are interning, they are regularly asked to come back as full-time employees with average starting salaries in the top 10 percent of U.S. household incomes. Thus, elite internships are an understudied gateway that propel some people into the upper echelons of STEM jobs. Although the role of class background in hiring for these STEM jobs is assumed to be minimal due to the emphasis on “objective” technical skills, our research suggests the opposite: that hiring decisions for these internships are influenced by tacit markers of class background like “fit” and “communication style.” By simultaneously studying the hiring process at Big Tech firms from both sides—the demand-side evaluations of job applicants by employers and supply-side choices and preparation of job applicants—this research illuminates the hidden factors that shape who is offered elite internships.

The impact of smartphones on the quality of social interaction between parents and their teenage children (2016-2018)

Collaborators:
Gillian Hayes, Professor, UCI
Simone Lanette, Doctoral Student, UCI
Phoebe Chua, Doctoral Student, UCI

This project evaluated the social consequences of mobile phone ubiquity during parent-child interactions. Data collection included 121 experiment pairs and data analysis included 100 experimental pairs. Post experiment qualitative interviews were conducted with all 242 individuals. We found minimal evidence to suggest that the mere presence of mobile phones has a negative impact on parent-teen interactions. Rather, parent-teen relationships have a stronger influence on reported interactions in the mere presence of mobile phones. However, mobile phones are associated with parent-teen conflicts within the home when parents and teens disagree about where current attention focus should be located. In addition, parents and teens are concerned about their mobile phone usage but have little understanding how to assess “good” mobile phone behaviors. Instead, parents and teens often report guilt, concern, and vigilance to use the phone “less” even though they have limited understanding of what “less” what would like for themselves or their family members. 

Creating a Data-Driven World: Situated Practices of Collecting, Curating, Manipulating, and Deploying Data in Healthcare (2013- 2016)

Collaborators:
Katie Pine, Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

NSF #1319897

This project examined the situated practices, human assumptions, and organizational routines that transform "little data" into mineable stores of "big data" harnessed for measures and metrics.  Currently, our knowledge about the origins of big data and what goes into collecting, curating, manipulating, and deploying these huge information resources is limited. We know even less about the social and cultural implications of these activities, particularly in non-academic contexts. A growing group of scholars urge critical interrogation of the methods, analytical assumptions, and underlying biases of big data science. A nuanced understanding of the situated practices through which big datasets are assembled and manipulated is required before we can comprehend their social and political implications, particularly if we are to evaluate the quality of the scientific results based on analysis on the manipulation of such datasets.

The research was carried out through a multi-sited ethnography of obstetrical data production in healthcare, an area where big data and associated metrics are both important and problematic.  First, it will examine the situated practice and lived experience of creating the massive amounts of information that come to form the datasets. Second, it will trace how the results emerge through automatized measures and algorithms and affect the very environments they are supposed to reflect. This research spans the lifecycle of data. It will investigate how information is collected by practitioners, clerks, and coders and transformed into local repositories of supposedly "clean" data to be manipulated by performance improvement specialists. It will then trace how information is transferred and refined further in a statewide data center and deployed by a major quality improvement organization. Finally, the research will follow the aggregated data back to the local hospitals themselves and assess how data visualizations and performance measures affect local decisions and hospital functioning.

Communication Technologies and the micro-dynamics of ‘interaction layering’ during the personal time of busy professionals (2012- 2014)

Collaborators:
Christine Beckman, Professor, University of Southern California
Ellie Harmon, Doctoral Student, UCI

Users of mobile communication devices are confronted with the daily necessity of managing when and where they communicate with others. Technologies that enable mobile, wearable, and near-ubiquitous communication have made leaps in functionality and affordability. Such technologies extend our capacity to be connected: indeed constant connectivity is the norm for many. But, with capacity comes responsibility: responsibility to colleagues; responsibility to family; and responsibility to self. Unfortunately, the expectations, desires, and values of these parties are in flux and rarely aligned. Expected availability to a variety of communication partners, regardless of temporal or physical location, is becoming more and more taken for granted in many workplaces and in many families. Understanding how individuals negotiate their accessibility via wireless technologies in daily practice is the focus of this research. 

While the role of mobile and ubiquitous technologies in today’s social landscape is a significant research topic, ethnographic studies that shed light on the daily social practices and implications of operating in an environment of expanded availability are rare. How, when, why, and to what end do people engage with communication technologies outside of the workplace? These questions have implications for individual well-being, social cohesion, and work effectiveness. This project seeks to fill this gap by conducting ethnographies of communication practices during ‘personal time.’ This study will contribute to a greater understanding of the social dynamics of technologically-mediated communication and inform future work to address these expectations of expanded accessibility and near constant connectivity. This study will involve ethnographic fieldwork with 12 families during which we conduct interviews, in-home observations, and observation of daily activities outside of the workplace.

Predictable time off in elite consulting (2008 - 2012)

Collaborators:
Leslie Perlow, Professor, Harvard Business School
Elizabeth Hansen, Doctoral Student, Harvard Business School

This study was motivated by four related questions: How can an organization challenge temporal norms and encourage new ways of working that allow versatility and flexibility for individuals without undermining the work product? By what process might such a change emerge? What is the interplay between organizationally suggested structures and everyday work practices in engendering new ways of working? And is it possible to use personal needs as a shared goal to motivate such a shift? 

This research is part of a multi-year and multi-stage research project with an elite global consulting firm. This work unpacks the process and mechanisms underlying a change effort spearheaded by the organization and designed in concert with our research team. Prior to the change effort the work in this organization was done in teams but in an independent and time intensive fashion. The goal was to shift patterns of interdependencies to enable predictable time off from work related communication (one evening per week) for each individual on the project team. Achieving this goal required team members to coordinate in new ways. Such change is non-trivial. It necessitated a structural shift in work practices, new communication practices, a willingness to buck the culture of individual heroics, and create of new forms of trust among team members. As such, those teams who successfully enacted the change effort displayed an orientation to each other and the work in line with the definition of relational coordination described above.

We rely on qualitative data gathered through ongoing observations and retrospective interviews as well as quantitative data from performance evaluations and regular self-report surveys about the progress of the team. We had the opportunity to explore detailed data on 14 teams. We spent two years engaged in ethnographic fieldwork with the initial four experimental teams. We then followed up with retrospective interviews with the next ten experimental teams. Data includes over 100 interviews, months of observation of team activities and firm meetings, weekly poll data from team members, quarterly firm level survey data, and numerous archival materials.

BlackBerrys in the shoe world (2005-2008)

Solo Ethnographic Research Study

This research challenges the popular conception that BlackBerry use is solely an individual phenomenon. Email is social. People use and experience the potential for wireless email in terms of their occupational identity, daily work practices and organizational context. For this research I collected longitudinal qualitative data from the in-house legal counsel and U.S. mobile sales in a mid-sized footwear and apparel company to understand the process through which people experience wireless email over time. I examined how each group engaged with the BlackBerry from its introduction to over three years of use. My inductive study reveals how initial technological frames inform, but do not determine, emerging patterns of BlackBerry use and how such frames can shift dramatically over time. Further, I trace how individual impressions of a new communication technology evolves into shared norms that carry significant personal consequences for group members. I unpack how BlackBerry users in the legal team shaped the potential for constant access into a form of social constraint, while BlackBerry users in the sales force embraced expanded access to email as enabling increased autonomy and personal time. 

This study traces the process by which individuals frame and use a technology of connectivity and how groups engage in social shaping of technology use. Focusing on the experience of two occupational functions, this research discusses the key factors of difference – identity, materiality, vulnerability and visibility – that speak to the diverse trajectories of use witnessed across individuals and between groups. Finally, this research argues that expectations of heterogeneity enabled one group to develop and maintain communication norms that allowed concrete personal benefits, both on and off the job. While expectations of homogeneous patterns of use in the other group led to tension, frustration, and an erosion of ‘personal time.’ This work has implications for technological frames of reference, communication norms, social structuring of technologies, systems of social control, and work / life balance.

This study is a longitudinal qualitative field study based on three years of data on BlackBerry use at Linden, a major footwear and manufacturing company. The research is based on multiple qualitative methods including unstructured interviews, email protocol reviews, on-site observation, and three open-ended email surveys sent to the entire BlackBerry user population in the firm. I also gathered numerous documents throughout fieldwork including merchandise presentations, sales and forecasting reports, and documents created to accompany the roll-out of BlackBerrys.