In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human–drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge, we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore their aesthetic potential. Through a bricolage approach to analysing interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team’s code, we describe how teams 1) shifted their efforts from aiming for seamless human–drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaged with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely probe, understand and define their drone’s capabilities; 3) adopted different workaround strategies, emphasising either training the drone or the pilot. We contribute an empirical account of constraints in shaping the potential aesthetics of drone behaviour, and discuss how programming environments could better support somaesthetic perception–action loops for design and programming purposes.

Abstract Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work.

In this paper, we examine how two chat apps fit into the communication ecosystem of six large distributed enterprises, in India and Kenya. From the perspective of management, these chat apps promised to foster greater communication and awareness between workers in the field, and between fieldworkers and the enterprises administration and management centres. Each organisation had multiple different types of chat groups, characterised by the types of content and interaction patterns they mediate, and the different organisational functions they fulfil. Examining the interplay between chat and existing local practices for coordination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we discuss how chat manifests in the distributed workplace and how it fits -- or otherwise -- alongside the rhythms of both local and remote work. We contribute to understandings of chat apps for workplace communication and provide insights for shaping their ongoing development.

Cooperatives are member-owned organisations, run for the common benefit of their members. While cooperatives are a longstanding way of organising, they have received little attention in CSCW. In this paper, through interviews with 26 individuals from 24 different cooperatives, our focus is an exploratory inquiry on how cooperatives could expand thinking into what future economies can look like and the part technologies may play in them. We discuss (1) the work to make the co-op work, that is, the special effort involved in managing an enterprise in a democratic and inclusive way, (2) the multiple purposes that cooperatives can serve for their members, well beyond financial benefit, and (3) ICT usage within cooperatives as a site of tension and dialogue. We conclude by discussing the meaning and measures of success in alternative economies, and lessons learned for CSCW scholarship on civic and societal organisations.

While lightweight text messaging applications have been researched extensively, new messaging applications such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Snapchat offer some new functionality and potential uses. Moreover, the role messaging plays in interaction and talk with those who are co-present has been neglected. In this article, we draw upon a corpus of naturalistic recordings of text message reading and composition to document the face-to-face life of text messages. Messages, both sent and received, share similarities with reported speech in conversation; they can become topical resource for local conversation–supporting verbatim reading aloud or adaptive summaries. Yet with text messages, their verifiability creates a distinctive resource. Similarly, in message composition, what to write may be discussed with collocated others. We conclude with discussion of designs for messaging in both face-to-face, and remote, communication.

Drawing on 168 hours of video recordings of smartwatch use, this paper studies how context influences smartwatch use. We explore the effects of the presence of others, activity, location and time of day on 1,009 instances of use. Watch interaction is significantly shorter when in conversation than when alone. Activity also influences watch use with significantly longer use while eating than when socialising or performing domestic tasks. One surprising finding is that length of use is similar at home and work. We note that usage peaks around lunchtime, with an average of 5.3 watch uses per hour throughout a day. We supplement these findings with qualitative analysis of the videos, focusing on how use is modified by the presence of others, and the lack of impact of watch glances on conversation. Watch use is clearly a context-sensitive activity and in discussion we explore how smartwatches could be designed taking this into consideration.

Personal assistants using a command-dialogue model of speech recognition, such as Siri and Cortana, have become increasingly powerful and popular for individual use. In this paper we explore whether similar techniques could be used to create a speech-based agent system which, in a group meeting setting, would similarly monitor spoken dialogue, pro-actively detect useful actions, and carry out those actions without specific commands being spoken. Using a low-fi technical probe, we investigated how such a system might perform in the collaborative work setting and how users might respond to it. We recorded and transcribed a varied set of nine meetings from which we generated simulated lists of automated 'action items', which we then asked the meeting participants to review retrospectively. The low rankings given on these discovered items are suggestive of the difficulty in applying personal assistant technology to the group setting, and we document the issues emerging from the study. Through observations, we explored the nature of meetings and the challenges they present for speech agents.

Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phone? such as Uber and Lyft-have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how "ride-sharing" transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in "labour issues": changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities -- jobs -- and how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.

This paper examines mobile internet search, presenting search not as a process of information retrieval, but as part of conversation and talk. Through video extracts of mobile search we explore how mobile phones are interwoven into talk, and how searchers manage the participation of other conversationalists alongside the search itself. We introduce the notion of a 'searchable object' -- an object that arises in conversation that can be searched for online -- and document how such an object occasions a search. In turn we discuss the differing roles of the device 'driver' and 'passenger', and how participation is managed through questions and narration. Rather than search being solely about getting correct information, conversations around search may be just as important. We conclude by critiquing some of the pessimistic views of interaction around mobile phones and their use in ordinary life and talk.

This paper advances the study of batteries in everyday life. We provide a situated understanding of smartphone battery care based on a qualitative user study involving device logging and behavioral tracking to support our inquiry. Our findings depict how caring for batteries fits into everyday routines, the work that is done to prepare and maintain an infrastructure that supports mobile energy needs, and the ways in which batteries are monitored and preserved. Moreover, they illustrate what happens when everyday routines are disrupted and when planning or infrastructure fails, causing flat batteries and the need to apply mechanisms for coping. We build on these insights to propose shifting the research focus from user and device centric approaches towards more contextualized understandings of situated practices. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for two increasingly important topics within HCI, personal informatics and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The explosion of mobile applications and services presents challenges for evaluation and user study. One successful approach has been to deploy instrumented applications, logging their use over long periods of time. We present an expansion of this by remotely recording video and audio of use, while also capturing device and app context. In vivo combines five data collection techniques -- screen recording, ambient audio recording, wearable cameras, data logging and distributed remote uploads. This data provides a range of insights and we discuss examples from previous work which reveal interaction design issues where interface confusions or task mismatches occur. We see how apps are integrated into ongoing activity and environment (such as how maps are used in situ), and how recorded conversations around and about apps may be used for evaluation purposes. We conclude by arguing that this combinative method helps us to move from considering app use in isolation, to studying app use in interaction.

Internet connected mobile devices are an increasingly ubiquitous part of our everyday lives and we present here the results from unobtrusive audio-video recordings of iPhone use -- over 100 days of device use collected from 15 users. The data reveals for analysis the everyday, moment-by-moment use of contemporary mobile phones. Through video analysis of usage we observed how messages, social media and internet use are integrated and threaded into daily life, interaction with others, and everyday events such as transport, delays, establishment choice and entertainment. We document various aspects of end-user mobile device usage, starting with understanding how it is occasioned by context. We then characterise the temporal and sequential nature of use. Lastly, we discuss the social nature of mobile phone usage. Beyond this analysis, we reflect on how to draw these points into ideas for design.

Despite the widespread use of mobile devices, details of mobile technology use 'in the wild' have proven difficult to collect. This paper uses video data to gain new insight into the use of mobile computing devices. Our new method combines screen-capture of iPhone use with video recordings from wearable cameras. We use this data to analyse how mobile device use is threaded into other co-present activities, focusing on the use of maps and internet searches. Close analysis reveals novel aspects of gestures on touch screens, how they serve 'double duty' - both as interface gestures but as as resources for ongoing joint action. We go on to describe how users 'walk the blue dot' to orientate themselves, and how searches are occasioned by the local environment. In conclusion, we argue that mobile devices - rather than pushing us away from the world around us - are instead just another thread in the complex tapestry of everyday interaction.