What values do technologists cite when evaluating technologies intended for application in “real world” social contexts like domestic settings? This paper examines the negotiation of values among the organizers who design and run the world’s largest domestic service robotics competition, RoboCup@Home. We perform an interpretive analysis of collaborative discussions from the organization’s open GitHub repositories and meeting notes from the years 2015-2023, informed by participatory digital ethnography and on-site fieldwork at the annual competition. Our analysis reveals the pervasive invocation of values, such as “realistic” and antivalues, such as “unfair”, in these discussions. We find that the perception of infeasibility strongly discouraged adoption of proposals that organizers otherwise agreed would have made RoboCup@Home, and domestic service robotics, more realistic, natural, and fair. We suggest future work pay attention to polysemy in negotiation of values, trace the shared values yet unrealized in negotiated settings, and consider infrastructural interventions that expand the feasibility of realizing values. The “real worlds” and values negotiated within spaces of competitive evaluation, be they imagined, realized, or unrealized, nonetheless shape the sociotechnical realities we and our technologies come to create and inhabit.

HRI scholars envision a future of work where human-robot collaboration brings mutual gains: organizations benefit from increased efficiency and productivity, and laborers benefit when tasks are redistributed between humans and robots based on their respective strengths. Yet, ironically, this collaboration in real-world contexts can lead to the opposite effect-workers' efficiency may decrease due to the additional tasks they must undertake to manage unexpected errors caused by robots. This “stop-gap” labor, often viewed as temporary and naturally manageable over time, can have significant and persistent impacts on workers. Drawing from observations across multiple robot deployment sites, this paper highlights the overlooked burden of this labor, challenging idealized visions of seamless human-robot collaboration. We argue that attending to stop-gap labor presents an opportunity for the HRI community to make genuine improvements for workers as primary stakeholders within complex socio-economic networks.

This paper examines the rapid introduction of AI and automation technologies within essential industries amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on participant observation and interviews within two sites of waste labor in the United States, we consider the substantial effort performed by frontline workers who smooth the relationship between robotics and their social and material environment. Over the course of the research, we found workers engaged in continuous acts of calibration, troubleshooting, and repair required to support AI technologies over time. In interrogating these sites, we develop the concept of "patchwork": human labor that occurs in the space between what AI purports to do and what it actually accomplishes. We argue that it is necessary to consider the often-undervalued frontline work that makes up for AI's shortcomings during implementation, particularly as CSCW increasingly turns to discussions of Human-AI collaboration.

This pictorial critically explores the role of visual media representations in the deployment of automated and artificially intelligent (AI) technologies within essential work sectors. We draw on an exhaustive review of local and national newspaper articles about automation in two waste labor industries (cleaning and recycling) over the last five years. We highlight a set of common visual tropes and move to challenge these representations by taking up the lens of countervisuality. Our analysis reveals that press photographs tend to focus on machines and the decision-makers who champion them, overlooking the work that it takes to integrate technology on the ground. Through our countervisuals, we depict the extensive efforts of waste workers to maintain AI technologies, and their potential for surveillance. Through visualizing under-recognized forms of labor that come after the design process ends, we highlight how an outsized emphasis on invention ignores waste workers’ expertise and needs over time.

This pictorial examines the relationship between inquiry and activism within academic settings through the design of protest artifacts. Inspired by lineages of feminist print production, we illustrate our own process of creating simple acts of resistance through electronic posters and buttons. Naming these interventions "lightweight design interactions," we hold on to the ways design practice might work as modest, partial, and incremental shifts in the circumstances through which design futures unfold. Lightweight design interactions encourage us as design researchers to look beyond the bold creation of alternatives (new design artifacts) to the subtle nurturing of the circumstances that make alternatives possible.

This paper describes the Making Core Memory project, a design inquiry into the invisible work that went into assem-bling core memory, an early form of computer information storage initially woven by hand. Drawing on feminist tradi-tions of situated knowing, we designed an electronic quilt and a series of participatory workshops that materialize the work of the core memory weavers. With this case we not only broaden dominant stories of design, but we also reflect on the entanglement of predominantly male, high status labor with the ostensibly low-status work of women's hands. By integrating design and archival research as a means of cultural analysis, we further expand conversations on design research methods within human-computer inter-action (HCI), using design to reveal legacies of practice elided by contemporary technology cultures. In doing so, this paper highlights for HCI scholars that worlds of hand-work and computing, or weaving and space travel, are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.