Hybrid work has become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its popularity, many organisations still strive to find an answer to "how to do hybrid cooperation right''. Enabling collaboration across digital and physical workspaces, participants, and practices is a great challenge, as it inevitably introduces asymmetric relations, incongruences in frames of reference, and misaligned ecosystems and technical infrastructures. The paper investigates approaches used to manage asymmetries in hybrid work settings and their impact on cooperation. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, we reveal a prevalent reliance on mimicking tools and practices native to fully physical or fully digital settings in the hybrid space. These mimicking practices often arise because the hybrid work setting is viewed through a deficit lens, whereby it is perceived as lacking certain elements (e.g., body, voice, mobility) and access to modalities from especially the physical setting, thereby necessitating the need for compensation work. To provide vocabulary to conceptualize and articulate this type of practice, we introduce the concept compensation work, referring to work that is carried out to offset a deficiency or absence that has been identified, aiming to restore and re-establish a familiar state that has vanished. While compensating through mimicking is intuitive, such approaches assume that our known practices and interactions from the physical workspace can indeed be translated to another context, neglecting the fact that changing the medium inevitably impacts the message. Thus, cooperative practices and interactions taking place in the physical workspace do not remain the same when unfolding in the hybrid space. Finally, we suggest that in order to design technologies and practices that support hybrid cooperation we first need to acknowledge the hybrid workspace as a distinct "third space'' next to the fully remote and fully physical workspace. This includes following an experience-driven approach to hybrid cooperation, encouraging the design of innovative interactions that extend beyond merely compensating for asymmetries and leveraging the unique capabilities and affordances of these settings.

Abstract It has been argued that emergent AI systems should be viewed as working partners rather than tools. Building on this perspective, this study investigates the process through which academics develop a working partnership with generative AI chatbots using a relationship lens and collaborative autoethnographic methods. Based on a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of our experiences of working with AI, we identify five stages of relationship development in building a successful working partnership with generative AI: Playing Around, Infatuation, Committing, Frustration, and Enlightenment and Readjustment. In reporting each stage, we provide vignettes to illustrate the emotional and cognitive challenges and rewards involved, the developing skills, and the experienced anthropomorphic dimension of this emerging relationship. Drawing on prior theory, we identify and examine three types of work that are required in developing this working partnership: articulation work, relationship work, and identity work. We analyse how each type of work unfolds with the stages of relationship development and consider implications for research and practice.

Designing new technologies to support synchronous interaction across distances has for many years focused on creating symmetry for participation between geographically distributed actors. Symmetry in synchronous interaction has, to some extent, been achieved technologically (while multiple social, historical, political, and hierarchical concerns continue to exist) and proven empirically in the increased use of remote-work technologies that were used during the pandemic. However, synchronous interaction in hybrid work is achieved differently, since the asymmetry produced by some participants being collocated while others geographically distributed introduces increased complexities for such interactions. Focusing on this challenge, we ask: To what extent can symmetry in cooperative work engagements be achieved in hybrid work contexts? We explore this question by interrogating multiple different empirical examples of synchronous hybrid interaction collected across different organizations, activities, and events. We found that the effort required to accomplish hybrid work includes additional articulation work necessary for bounding multiple intertwined artefacts across sites, devices, and applications. Further, the multiple artefacts setup across sites, combined with asymmetric collocation across participants, produce incongruence in technological frames of reference for each participant. All participants in hybrid work have only partial access to the hybrid setup, and no single person has access to the complete setup. The incongruence in technological frames produces insurmountable gaps in collaboration, causing all hybrid work situations to be characterized fundamentally by asymmetric relationships. We argue that symmetry in hybrid synchronous interaction is impossible to attain in attempts to solve this problem through design. Instead, we propose that designers of cooperative technologies for hybrid work shift towards developing artefact-ecologies supporting hybrid work, focusing on asymmetry as a necessary feature. Fundamentally, the design strategy should explore novel ways of taking advantage of the multiple different artefact-ecologies which serve as the foundation for the hybrid collaboration. Instead of striving for symmetry, we propose to feature asymmetric conditions in future technology designs for hybrid interaction.

Hybrid work has become a popular in post-pandemic times, helping organisations in attracting/retaining employees by offering greater flexibility and alternative modes of working. Despite the great interest in hybrid cooperation, recent research reveals prevailing challenges with current technologies and practices. In the search for the “right setup” for hybrid cooperation, some research tend to narrowly focus on developing technical solutions for rather isolated problems. In this paper, we wish to problematize these tendencies found in the literature and shortcomings in current technologies and practices, by shedding light on articulation work- an overlooked aspect related to managing hybrid work. The paper presents Collab.ai, a fictional AI-powered calendar and planning tool that re-imagines the planning for hybrid cooperation, followed by three additional artifacts that are aimed at amplifying various aspects of Collab.ai. Using a discursive design approach, the paper and these artifacts are aimed at provoking reflections about future hybrid cooperation tools and practices.

In December 2010, a young market trader set himself on fire in protest in front of the governor’s palace in Tunisia. This event marked the beginning of mass protests, which within 6 weeks led to the resignation of the Tunisian government and to the departure of the president. Subsequently, protests against unpopular governments spread to neighbouring countries throughout northern Africa, and to additional countries in the Middle East. A number of governments were overthrown, and in Syria a civil war is still raging today. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Mena region have lost their homes and are now on the run, and most countries are now considered politically unstable. These political developments have been described under various labels, such as, the Arab Spring and the Arab Revolution . In the early days of this protest movement, these developments were framed in mainstream media as ‘Facebook’s Revolution’ or ‘Revolution 2.0’. Beneath these headings and framings is the assumption, or rather the thesis, that the rapid spread of the protests and the uprisings would not have been possible without the intensive use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. To put it bluntly, there was (and perhaps still is), the assumption that these social media made the Arab Spring and the revolution possible in the first place.

In this article, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech entrepreneurship possible. We report from a longitudinal ethnographic study of tech entrepreneurs situated in occupied Palestine. By investigating this polar case of tech entrepreneurship, we identify critical infrastructures that are otherwise invisible and go unnoticed. We propose infrastructural accessibility as a method to identify available and absent infrastructures in concrete trans-local situations. Infrastructural accessibility leads us to identify multiple dimensions of critical infrastructures necessary for the success of tech startups. This includes infrastructures related to location, community, funding, digital platforms, politics, and history. Our study shows how these multiple dimensions of infrastructural accessibility shape the everyday practices of tech entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our study reveals how Palestinian tech entrepreneurship is characterized by infrastructural inaccessibility due to missing infrastructures related to mobility, legal frameworks, payment gateways, and mobile Internet. Infrastructural inaccessibility seriously limits tech entrepreneurs’ potential to succeed in creating a long-term sustainable tech industry.

This paper identifies the design challenges for creating collaborative technologies supporting the practices of organizing elections. We ethnographically investigate the distributed nature of knowledge as enacted between heterogeneous groups over the course of three elections in Denmark. We 1) identify fundamental characteristics of elections, 2) provide a comprehensive account of the distributed nature of knowledge in organizing and executing elections, and 3) point to new challenging areas for human-computer interaction (HCI) design supporting distributed collaborative knowledge practices. We found that organizational pattern of elections complicates the embodiment of nomadic knowledge, which is crucial for managing the effective organization of an election. Thus, one of the relevant design challenges is finding out how to support the timely distribution of large amounts of information, while still ensuring it is appropriately divided and delivered to various groups participating in planning and executing elections.