The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the nature of work by shifting most in-person work to a predominantly remote modality. Many office workers needed to reconstruct their homes as work-friendly places and their virtual work offices as home-friendly spaces. As these boundaries between home and workspaces have become blurred, people have had to modify or redefine the sense of home places (i.e., topophilia). This locational shift of work provides an opportunity to explore the potential roles of technologies in supporting work–family balance in the remote work setting. In this project, we draw on boundary theory and humanistic geography as theoretical lenses to understand remote workers’ experiences when working from home and envision digital technologies to support remote workers’ wellness.
Collaborators
- Janghee Cho
- Samuel Beck
Publications
- Cho, J., Beck, S., & Voida, S. (to appear). Topophilia, placemaking, and boundary work: Exploring the psycho-social impact of the COVID-19 work-from-home experience. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP ‘22), Virtual Event.
- Cho, J., & Voida, S. (2019). Toward critical reflection: Observing practices of noticing to develop interventions in personal informatics. Position paper for the DIS 2019 workshop on Exploring Noticing as Method in Design Research, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2019), San Diego, California, June 24.
