Care work — home care, the labour of looking after people — is being reorganised by software that was not designed with care in mind. Scheduling systems, rating systems, and platformic management arrive in a domain where the work is relational before it is transactional, and where what counts as doing the job well is not easily captured by anything a platform measures.
This project studies that collision: what a relationship-centred account of home care work makes visible that a task-centred one does not; how platformic management operates from the worker's side, read through digital ethnography and reverse engineering; and how people resist, refuse, or work around AI systems introduced into their work rather than simply adopting them.
It also holds the lab's line of critical design work — on novelty and reconfiguration in a computer-saturated world, and on how technology marketed for a vulnerable population encodes assumptions about that population's worth.
Themes across projects
- Relationships with AI, and relationships mediated by AIAlso in AI-Mediated Communication
- How AI changes the way that we “are people”Also in AI-Mediated Communication
- Design choices that make a system caring, or fail toAlso in Bystander Intervention & Online Safety
- Methodological pluralism — questions shape methods, not dogmaShared by every project
Publications
Published
- 2025
A relationship-centered perspective on home care work
Steup & Jung · PACM HCI 9(7), 1–23
- 2026
Reverse engineering as a component of digital ethnography: studying platformic management on Honor
Nam & Steup · CHI 2026 Extended Abstracts
- 2025
Exploring resistance and other oppositional responses to AI
Baumer, Cha, Khovanskaya, Steup, Vertesi & Wong · CSCW 2025 Companion
- 2026
Artful reconfiguration: decoupling novelty and design in a computer-saturated world
Steup, Chigozie-Okwum, Gavade & Baumer · PACM HCI
- 2025
The fears, the hopes, the oscillations: a critical analysis of tech startups targeting autism
Wang, Seetharaman, Steup, Su & Ringland · ASSETS 2025