Rethinking technology on the boundaries of life and work

Abstract

Technology is often seen as seamless, or making (life/work) boundaries go away. Ubicomp designs for that and for seamlessness in general. However, there may be better ways of understanding boundaries, as to design technologies in the space of changing work/life boundaries, which is the topic of this special issue. This paper makes a theoretical argument to insist that boundaries are not fixed, neither can or should they be made away with technologically, through seamless technologies. Based on this argument, it discusses various presumed technology-mediated boundaries of work and home, life, etc., as they can be found in the Ubicomp, CSCW and HCI literature: The ways in which work and work technologies are stereotypically connected to effectiveness and hard labor, and nonwork technologies to fun and enjoyment; the ways in which technologies move back and forth between mediating work activity and non-work; the role of place and time boundaries in relation to the ability to work any time, anywhere and the metaphors used to address these boundaries; and the perceived boundaries of private versus public, and the new boundaries created by technologies in and across our lives and work. Using an empirical case, the paper offers an alternative use of boundaries as resources to be activated and used in design. It suggests that we need to more carefully design technologies that provide seamfulness on these specific and dynamic boundaries.

From Work to Life and Back Again: Examining the Digitally-Mediated Work/Life Practices of a Group of Knowledge Workers

“…In conclusion, this paper presents a rich picture of the practices of a cohort of men and women in knowledge-intensive roles as they develop and deploy strategies and boundaries for dealing with work and non-work. The paper contributes to CSCW in 2 ways: firstly some of our findings significantly add to those from previous research that they resonate with, via novel and nuanced empirical material, particularly about boundaries as resources (Bødker 2016), variability of individual strategies and their match to personal circumstances (Gray et al 2016), complex motivations underpinning one's strategies (De Carvalho et al 2017;Jarrahi and Sawyer 2017), and the labour-intensive nature of personal tasks (Verne and Bratteteig 2016). Secondly, we have presented novel findings that charter new territory for future CSCW research on the technological mediation of work/life practices that we summarise below.…”

“…Boundaries are an important concept in CSCW, both in terms of how they occur in practices, and of tools for defining and handling them. Particularly regarding work and life, Bødker (2016) argues that '(…) boundaries are not fixed, neither can or should they be made away with technologically, through seamless technologies' (Bødker 2016 p. 533), extending a CSCW view of boundaries as resources, and as being both specific and dynamic. Bødker argues also that boundaries are not established between different sets of values (for example the idealised home life vs. the challenging work life), but rather as means to handle complexity in both realms of life.…”

Why Work Overtime? A Systematic Review on the Evolutionary Trend and Influencing Factors of Work Hours in China

“…However, the results of this study reflected the positive relationship between them. We believe that the continuous advancement of modern science and technology, especially information technology, has accelerated the operation of business, intensified time competition (112), further blurred the boundaries between the individual's work space and living space (113), and led to an indefinite extension in the number of employee work hours. Thus, work hours have not decreased, either overall or at an individual level.…”

Working in a post Covid-19 world: Towards a conceptual framework for distributed work

“…We argue that this may indeed be a consequence of remote work in certain settings, but that it is not a necessary consequence. Indeed, the argument can be made that the affordances of contemporary information systems which support remote work may, in some cases, increase rather than decrease the degree of supervision over workers (Bødker, 2016;Spivack & Rubin, 2011). Nonetheless, it must be conceded that the nature of supervision changes when co-workers do not share a physical location.…”