The project uses a mixed-method design. The debate on automation is in dire need of an academically informed intervention based in theoretical scholarship and in-depth empirical research. The project will achieve this by using tailored future anthropology and design anthropology approaches to develop qualitative understandings of the future of work. These will be based on nuanced understandings of future technological possibilities, while also considering the insights of in-depth ethnographic research in the present, and workshop-based research into how existing and future work are experienced, imagined and articulated. The main methodological tools are as follows:
Design ethnography: Ethnographic studies of how the anticipatory modes of trust, hope and anxiety emerge from existing everyday working circumstances will be undertaken at each research site, involving two methods that have been tested in previous research, further developed and tailored for AUTOWORK:
1) Qualitative ethnographic work, such as observations, interviews and video recording combined with re-enactment techniques. Developed in design anthropology, these involve participants performing a task or a workplace routine. The participant will describe how this task is presently meaningful in relation to existing levels of automation and how it may be imagined/sensed in a future where automation and AI are increasingly dominant. The interviews, observations and re-enactments will involve 20 workers (a standard size for a qualitative ethnographic sample) in each country for each empirical WP (n=120 in total across all workshops) designed to represent existing gender and age distribution in each sector.
2) Design anthropological futures workshops where researchers use innovative materials based on ethnographic findings and examples of technologically possible futures. Working with participants from stakeholder groups including workers, unions, managers, and technology designers, these workshops will imagine, create and explore possible or probable automated future scenarios. The workshops will investigate how these future scenarios would be experienced and sensed, their ethics, the gender and power relationships they would entail and the regulatory frameworks they would require. There will be three workshops in both countries, with 20 stakeholders invited for each (n=120).
These methods are tailored refinements of methods that have been tested in earlier research with workers in construction, healthcare and delivery services. They innovatively use qualitative participant shadowing, collaborative re-enactments and video and sensory ethnography.
Comparative analysis: This project will create a new transferable comparative framework through which to research and analyse AUTOWORK futures, both across sectors and cross-culturally. This will enable us to develop a set of key principles, verified as applicable in different industry and national/cultural settings, for researching, analysing, understanding and proposing industry and policy-based interventions for future automated work. This will make the findings internationally significant and not merely relevant in the Norwegian and Australian context. This will be achieved by engaging and further developing a highly successful and established anthropological model for comparative analysis based on the notion of concept- metaphors. Concept-metaphors are framing devices used to compare things that are differently constituted in different research sites and cultural contexts but nevertheless have similar meanings, thus enabling us to compare different sites in the same cultural context as well as across different national contexts.
