This workshop focuses on remote care and wellbeing as we transition into a world increasingly adopting hybrid lifestyles and modes of operation.

Care and care work have predominantly been researched in traditionally in-person interpersonal contexts. The growing adoption of information and communication technologies towards remote care has created new workflows and resulted in emerging questions around the definitions and scope of such care practice. Our workshop intends to examine and engage in discussions around these implications of hybridity on care and care work. Further, the confluence of technological, sociocultural, geopolitical, and climatic realities of the current day brings into focus the need to unpack the idea of "care," and the role that HCI researchers could play in creating equitable futures of remote and hybrid care.

Our workshop aims to bring these threads of discussion together—care for our bodies, our selves, and our environment— to chart a path forward for research on the future of hybrid and remote work. Across the threads, the invisibility of care labor—an important consideration in prior research and discourse in HCI—would crucially need to be reexamined as sociotechnical care assemblages and infrastructures change with the times. Looking beyond care at an individual and community-level, we intend for the workshop to help reflect on what it means to consider the pressing need for environmental and planetary care as goals and outcomes of our research. With climate change being a defining problem of the time, we aim for this discourse to also lead to meaningful insights into a research agenda for sustainable hybrid futures of care work.

This workshop will focus on questions such as "What does holistic wellbeing look like in the era of hybrid caregiving?" and "How does environmental care factor into our research practice?" We invite researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in this workshop to reflect on these questions and advance the future of remote and hybrid care and wellbeing at CHI.

You can check out the full proposal here.

We intend to welcome relevant themes that our participants propose, in alignment with the goals of our workshop. We will start with inviting conversations on the following themes:

Wellbeing in an Era of Remote Work:

This theme will encourage participants to reflect on shifting priorities around work and care, and how the growing transition to remote and hybrid work may affect individual and community wellbeing. Our reflections will include addressing: "How can technology and workplaces for the (hybrid) futures of work be designed to center care?" and "What are the effects of moving work remote on worker wellbeing?"

Remote and Hybrid Caregiving:

The goal of this theme is to discuss remote care in the context of personal health and wellbeing, generally exemplified by telemedicine and telehealth, patient education and empowerment, and health tracking and datafication. We aim to extend conversations in this domain by unpacking how current understandings and approaches to this research could adapt to the increasing adoption of hybrid caregiving practices. We encourage participants to draw connections between their submissions and their worldviews around the hybrid future of care and wellbeing. Our discussions, ideally, will help answer questions like: "What does holistic wellbeing look like in the era of hybrid caregiving?"

Futures of Environmental Care and Sustainability:

Through this theme, we will deliberate on broader dimensions of hybrid care work including how we can draw research attention to environmental care both directly---as a subject of study---and indirectly---as a reflection on the environmental costs of our research. This theme will offer an opportunity to create future research directions on sustainable computing practices in hybrid care work, as well as a meta-level recognition, and plans for amelioration, of the planetary and environmental impacts of our research.

We highly encourage submissions that may be aligned with, but not squarely fitting, these themes!

Date: Sunday, 23 April 2023

Workshop format: Hybrid

Workshop structure:

Opening and Introductions - 1 hour

Break (10 minutes)

Small group discussions - 2 hours

Break (10 minutes)

Large group discussion, and closing remarks - 1 hour