Privacy is context-dependent which is now integral to the design of products and services for the end users, however, the decision to incorporate a pro-privacy product or service remains in the hands of the designer. While privacy defies a fixed definition, its meanings and implications are highly context dependent. Such context may be spatio-temporal, cultural, economic, individual or communitarian. The Corona outbreak is yet another unpredictable context in which privacy as an affordance, legal right or a human value assumes greater importance. In this workshop, we propose to examine the Work from Home imperative ushered in by the exigency of the pandemic in India.

Work from Home may not be a novel phenomenon but certain types of work in the context of the pandemic necessitate an understanding of how this movement of labor from physical professional environments to an online space reconfigures the boundaries of labor and leisure in the domestic space. Homes are no longer a place to relax and converse with your family, but are rendered ambiguously in public environments, which may be fraught contexts for privacy. This blurring of boundaries between private home space and public work space has profound implications for bodily, spatial and data privacy. For instance, video conferencing on laptops exposes family members, conversations and interior integrity in and of the home space. The at-home worker may not in fact feel at home at all, a disposition that leads to embodied labor to constantly perform the professional self. Intrusions including cooking noises of the pressure cooker may further introduce dissonance. Video conferencing technologies may themselves be prone to security breaches and create a sense of vulnerability on account of privacy.

In this workshop, we aim to open up a critical conversation on Work from Home culture in the Indian context where historically the affordance of privacy in a home space has remained a function of class i.e. upper-class individuals with bigger homes may enjoy greater spatial privacy vis-à-vis more modest abodes. Joint families sharing a home may pose constraints of sociality in accomplishing a temporally and spatially private setting in which one can feel relaxed to interface via video conferencing. Middle-class homes in India tend to disrupt individual privacy - bodily, psychological and individual autonomy.

• What happens when work enters home in the time of the pandemic when all family members have no choice but stay home?

• How is privacy negotiated under such conditions of social saturation?

• What are the larger implications of the technological mediation of the domestic space, a part of which must go online and be exposed?

As interdisciplinary scholars, we aim to map the emergent incompatibilities between work and leisure, private and public and self and the constitutive social. Our primary tool is ethnographic storytelling where we build an analytical framework through shared experiences of the Work from Home culture in India during the times of the pandemic. We plan to run a semi-moderated storytelling session to understand the diversity of experience, the interrelations among divergent and convergent perspectives and the question of work’s future at home. We hope to develop a theory of privacy from storytelling that enriches the repertoire of privacy and data security in South Asia through India as a lens.

This workshop aims at collecting stories from telecommuters to understand their work from home experience through the lens of privacy. Workshops provide an opportunity to bring together design researchers, design practitioners in academia, public sector, business and industry for a focused and interactive discussion. The methods that will be used during the workshop include: visual storytelling, theatrical storytelling, speculative design, design fiction among others. Our aim is not just to understand the mindset around privacy in the work from home space but also to convey these ideas to the participants and to develop privacy-first systems.

Building upon the past IndiaHCI privacy workshop, we invite position papers for the India HCI 2020 Workshop on “Privacy and the Pandemic in South Asia: Work From Home Culture, Class and Domestic Space”. This 3-Hours of workshop will offer an interdisciplinary forum of discussion for both academics and practitioners interested in exploring and solving privacy problems while working from home. The aim of the workshop is not just to understand the mindset around privacy in the work from home space but also to convey these ideas to the participants and to develop privacy-first systems.

Participation: Participants have to fill out the given form where we require participants interest of becoming a part of this workshop.

Participation Form

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission Deadline:

• Notification of acceptance:

• Registration Open : Registration is Open

• Registration deadline: 04 November, 2020

• Workshop: 06 November, 2020

Registration Details

Registration Fee INR 1000/USD $14

First participants have to open account in the conference registration site. After selecting the workshop, the payable amount will appear to proceed.

The workshop expands from 2:30 am to 5:30 pm IST. We will use ZOOM as our primary video conferencing tool.

Agenda will update shortly