Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-RM: Augmentation for Tomorrow: Expanding the Future Capacities of Independent Workers

技术进步正在改变人们的工作方式，他们能够完成的事情，以及他们想象的可能。长期以来，这些进步的目标之一就是提高工人的能力。然而，这些努力往往局限于提高生产力和安全，而不是提高个人福祉或创造力。这项研究提出了这样一种观点：如果设计得当，技术可以全面支持员工的需求，只有采用这种方法，我们才能为未来设计出可持续的人类/技术伙伴关系。调查人员将与媒体、法律和奖学金等领域的独立知识工作者合作，他们不是传统组织的全职员工。这些工人通常享有相对于各种因素组织工作的自由。然而，作为这种自由的一部分，他们经常感到压力，要有效地管理任务、时间、客户、合作者、财务、声誉，以及他们自己生活的许多非专业方面。通过关注这一群体如何将工作、家庭、家庭、志愿者责任和其他追求融入他们的日常生活，本研究将为确保未来更人性化的工作体验提供设计灵感，并为相关政策、基础设施和培训讨论提供信息。研究人员将在他们的专业环境中观察一组独立的知识工作者样本（平均分布在西海岸和东海岸）。每个工人在每次观察之前和之后都将接受采访。收集到的数据将与研究小组的第三名成员（一名设计研究员）合作进行分析，他将在每次观察后与必要的研究者进行汇报，以从该领域获得额外的见解。这些数据将被处理成一系列设计工作手册，用于支持联合数据分析，识别数据差距，并为研究的最后一年生成输入。在此期间，研究团队将与参与研究早期阶段的独立工作者进行参与式设计研讨会。调查人员还将传播有关如何重新构想人类/技术伙伴关系以支持对未来工作的更广泛理解的信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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. The investigators will collaborate with independent knowledge workers in domains such as media, law, and scholarship, who 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. 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. The researchers will observe a sample of independent knowledge workers in their professional environments (equally distributed on the West Coast and East Coast). Each worker will be interviewed before and after each observation. Collected data will be analyzed in collaboration with a third member of the research team, a design researcher, who will conduct a debrief session after each observation with the requisite investigator to elicit additional insights from the field. The data will be processed to create a series of design workbooks that will be used to support joint data analysis, identify data gaps, and generate inputs for the final year of the study. During this period, the research team will conduct participatory design workshops with the independent workers who participated in the earlier phase of the study. The investigators will also disseminate information about how human/technology partnerships can be reimagined to support a more expansive understanding of the future of work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.