Thursday, September 29, 2022, 11:30am

Independent workers—such as gig workers, online freelancers, or micro-entrepreneurs---take on heightened uncertainty in pursuit of flexible working arrangements. While workers may be independent from organizations' directive control, a decade of ethnographic studies have highlighted how independent workers—who are digitally distributed in space and time—are in fact interdependent on each other for social, emotional, and material support. To augment workers' quests for peer support, scholars and practitioners have designed dozens of intricate sociotechnical systems which foster large-scale, online peer support networks. Yet, solely sociotechnical approaches to peer support systems---which aim for universal user adoption—have failed to create systems which provide inclusive support for this rapidly growing and diverse workforce. Such approaches often overlook existing peer networks which are entirely offline, and the resulting systems are rarely accessible, or desirable, to workers with limited trust in technology or limited technology literacy.

In this dissertation, I articulate a method to co-design community-based peer support systems for work. This method follows a participatory action protocol to work with community partners who already foster existing networks of peer workers to understand if technological interventions can provide supplemental support. In the case that community partners decide to explore technological supplements for peer support, this method follows a co-design software protocol to build a peer support system which builds on existing, offline networks. This method deprioritizes technological contributions, and therefore outcomes of this method include not just a system, but also educational materials and in-person workshops. I illustrate this method across two multi-year community partnerships with local hubs for independent workers in Pittsburgh, PA.

Additional Information

Thesis Committee:
Chinmay Kulkarni (Chair)
Sarah Fox
Jeffrey Bigham
Tawanna Dillahunt (University of Michigan)
Wendy Ju (Cornell Tech)

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Orals
Room Number: In Person and Virtual - ET
Building: Reddy Conference Room, Gates Hillman 4405 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: YASMINE KOTTURI
Speaker Website: ykotturi.github.io
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Candidate, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Community Oriented Approaches to Building Peer Support Systems in Work
For More Information: ykotturi@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
Organization(s): SCS