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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I present a speculative design project focusing on the shifting relations between labor, affect, workers’ bodies, and technologies.

Paper long abstract:

The nature and experience of work has shifted over the last decades in tandem with technological developments. For workers, such developments have made possible one the one hand flexible hours and working remotely, as well as working longer hours and being always connected, and the other hand. For companies technologies offer the possibility to micromanage by monitoring productivity in terms of individual output and tracking worker performance at increasingly finer levels, e.g., monitoring average response time to emails or the quality of driving for Uber drivers. At the same time, work related stress and exhaustion have skyrocketed.

In this paper, I present a design project, which was an exercise in thinking speculatively about the future, focusing specifically on the shifting relations between labor, affect, workers' bodies, and technologies. The project's starting point is a future when labor-time is measured in heartbeats and employment contracts are written in terms of worker heartbeats.

Drawing on a diverse body of STS scholarship the project explores how bodies are figured and work is assessed through devices monitoring the body; it imagines different enactments of time, labor and affect; and, it suggests alternate entanglements made possible by the promiscuity of counting.