This multi-sited critical ethnography investigates how Mexican farmers' knowledge practices are reclassified as they circulate between smallholder farms in Mexico and greenhouses in Canada. These farmers are recognized as skilled at home and reclassified as `unskilled' in Canada, a shift reinforced by surveillance technologies and managerial control. From this empirical work, we introduce the \textit{prism of labour}. The prism traces how knowledge practices, skill classifications, and sociotechnical systems interrelate to form labour infrastructures, and provides a lens for analysis and intervention to consider how these infrastructures are formed, stabilized, and contested. Our contributions are threefold: we provide novel empirical research on migrant farm workers in HCI, introduce the prism as an analytic and intervention tool, and show how migration reorganizes expertise through classification, producing hybrid knowledge practices that reshape how technologies are adopted.
Worker-Centered Design (WCD) has gained prominence over the past decade, offering researchers and practitioners ways to engage worker agency and support collective actions for workers. Yet few studies have systematically revisited WCD itself, examining its implementations, challenges, and practical impact. Through a four-lens analytical framework that examines multiple facets of WCD within food delivery industry, we identify critical tensions and blind spots from a Multi-Laborer System perspective. Our analysis reveals conflicts across labor chains, distorted implementations of WCD, designers’ sometimes limited political-economic understanding, and workers as active agents of change. These insights further inform a Diagnostic-Generative pathway that helps to address recurring risks, including labor conflicts and institutional reframing, while cultivating designers’ policy and economic imagination. Following the design criticism tradition, and through a four-lens reflexive analysis, this study expands the action space for WCD and strengthens its relevance to real-world practice.
Collaborative robots (cobots) are often portrayed as transformative technologies that promise efficiency and productivity in industrial workplaces, with their roles frequently pre-defined as autonomous collaborators to human workers. This paper presents a different picture based on an 18-day robot-centered thing ethnography conducted in a small-scale factory. In practice, the roles of cobots were dynamically constituted through intra-actions among CNC machines, human workers, and the factory owner. Our analysis identifies three roles: (1) frontline operators carrying out repetitive tasks, (2) care receivers dependent on continuous maintenance and cleaning, and (3) scapegoating managers whose stoppages summoned human intervention and mediation. These relational configurations foreground dynamics that remain backgrounded in human-centered accounts and offer a deeper understanding of how cobots are enacted within production environments. We argue that understanding cobot integration and advancing practical design discourse requires moving beyond assumptions of collaboration and autonomy, recognizing cobots as entities continuously redefined through their relations with environments and other agents.
AI side hustles are increasingly promoted on social media as accessible, empowering, and profitable opportunities. This paper examines the gap between such platform narratives and workers' lived experiences through a mixed-method study of 7,938 RedNote posts and 16 semi-structured interviews. Our analysis identifies monetization typologies and rhetorical strategies that portray AI work as simple and rewarding, while interview data reveal hidden labor, unstable income, and the devaluation of human contributions. By juxtaposing platform narratives with lived experiences, we show how these narratives structurally foreground ease and reward while downplaying the precarity embedded in actual AI work. This study contributes a critical account of how AI side hustles are framed and experienced, and offers design implications for HCI: platforms should moderate promotional content and provide clearer risk communication, while designers of human–AI collaboration tools should highlight and value human input rather than allowing it to remain invisible.
The rapid expansion of the AI industry relies heavily on the production, verification, and maintenance of data, otherwise known as "data work". Companies outsource and offshore this work through global AI supply chains that operate under exploitative conditions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Kenyan data workers across platforms and BPOs, this paper examines how such conditions take shape and persist. We argue that workers are caught within a regime of entrapment, a system of interconnected mechanisms that make it difficult for workers to leave or improve their positions. These mechanisms include the push to invest in the promise of ‘AI’ jobs, the use of precarious contracts to govern workers, the capture of regulatory institutions, and the exploitation of global labor arbitrage. Using complementary lenses of neoliberal governmentality, precarity, and supply chain capitalism, we analyze why labor mobilization in this sector remains uniquely constrained. We conclude by outlining an orientation for research and scholarly practice that can support workers' organizing efforts and contest the structural conditions sustaining this regime.
Digital technologies play a role in the cognitive work of managing households, yet much of this labour remains invisible, making it harder to share, delegate, or value. Existing tools support household tasks but focus on visible activities such as chores or planning, leaving unclear how hidden domestic labour is supported. To address this, we surveyed 50 participants and conducted qualitative analysis. We found that value-driven labour, such as managing household vision and values, shapes other labours yet remains least visible and hardest to delegate. Domains like inclusion and special events appear salient in everyday life yet remain largely unsupported by current tools. We found that while family management is collaborative, most tools remain oriented to single users. We contribute an empirical mapping of digital support and gaps across six forms of family management labour, and offer a foundation for anticipating how emerging domestic technologies may support or inadvertently reshape this work.
The HCI community has called for renewed attention to labor issues and the political economy of computing. Yet much work remains in engaging with labor theory to better understand modern work and workers. This article traces the development of Labor Process Theory (LPT)—from Karl Marx and Harry Braverman to Michael Burawoy and beyond—and introduces it as an essential yet underutilized resource for structural analysis of work under capitalism and the design of computing systems. We examine HCI literature on labor, investigating focal themes and conceptual, empirical, and design approaches. Drawing from LPT, we offer directions for HCI research and practice: distinguish labor from work, link work practice to value production, study up the management, analyze consent and legitimacy, move beyond the point of production, design alternative institutions, and unnaturalize bourgeois designs. These directions can deepen analyses of tech-mediated workplace regimes, inform critical and normative designs, and strengthen the field's connection to broader political economic critique.