The 2024 CHIWORK conference took place last week at Northumbria University, up in Newcastle, and offered a great selection of interesting papers and discussions regarding the future of work.
This year, there were several papers which explored the topic of supporting workers not just in improving their productivity, but also considering factors such as ensuring workers’ autonomy and rights in the age of AI and worker wellbeing. In particular, I really enjoyed the exploratory work presented by Sowmya Somanath on designing technologies to support worker happiness and long-term satisfaction – an ongoing programme of work which I’m excited to follow. Yoana Ahmetoglu, one of my peers and good friend, also delivered an engaging talk on her paper regarding how time management apps could be better designed to reflect key strategies for supporting planning.
CHIWORK also offered a great platform for more exploratory research and reflections that inspired great discussions in the community. Several papers this year adopted a design fiction approach to explore different outlooks and possibilities of introducing AI in the workplace. Some of my favourite examples included Carine Lallemand et al.’s (2024)‘Trinity’, a thought-provoking fiction, imaginatively and immersively presented, in a future where every aspect of our individual and collaborative performances could be quantified and captured by AI, and the paper presented by Michael Muller et al. (2024), which raised important questions about the right of refusal when workers collaborate with organisational AI tools, and what our future may look like if human labour could be quantified and processed by AI just like any other piece of data. Beyond speculating about the future, there were also examples of new research methodologies for understanding human-AI interactions, such as the participatory prompting framework used by Ian Drosos et al. in their paper this year as well.
CHIWORK also included two interesting sessions that I particularly enjoyed. The first session was the Conversations panel, which involved two of my supervisors Professor Duncan Brumby and Professor Anna Cox presenting their alt.CHI work about the current state of academia and the place of AI within it. As a student, it was enlightening and interesting to observe how individuals within the community navigated their differing opinions on this topic and engaged in the debate. The second session was the Town Hall, which brought in-person and online participants together on a Miro board to brainstorm suggestions and ideas for future CHIWORK sessions. It was an interesting insight into understanding the ‘behind-the-scenes’ works of what defines a research community and how it all comes together.
Most exciting for me, as a PhD student, was getting the chance to meet and connect with fellow researchers and students who also worked in my field of interest – namely, the topic of user learning and expertise in the software. Meeting and chatting with Pranjal Jainand Molly Feldman and learning about their work really inspired me to reflect on my research ideas and approach in tackling my future PhD studies. There was also an impromptu opportunity to hop in and contribute to the conference itself – I ended up chairing the second session on ‘Inclusive and Accessible HCI’ on Wednesday, which was great for supporting my public speaking skills despite my initial nerves.
All in all, the conference organisers Marios Constantinides and Marta Cecchinato did a great job in getting the event together. I left CHIWORK this year inspired and excited to come back to Amsterdam for the next session in 2025!
