The Future of Healthful Work – an Exploration – is an interdisciplinary collaboration across university faculties to look at what we consider a grand challenge: how to co-design work to be healthful out of the box, rather than being something from which we must recover and attempt to rebuild health, on our own dime and time, at the end of each day?
We (the Team listed below) see this question as fundamentally complex and necessarily interdisciplinary. To begin to adequately engage the complexities of “work”, we need (1) multiple ways of knowing, such as perspectives from psychology, sociology, economics, human factors, human performance, computing, design, archaeology and (2) ways to learn from each other to interrogate and integrate our own epistemologies to be able to engage this vast topic, meaningfully.
Our approach: co-interogation and integration of voices, practices, processes – As a team each of us
has a long history of not only working / being funded across our typical councils, but of developing and leading interdisciplinary projects. We have also been working together on these ideas for over 18months across our disciplines from arts to engineering – for co-creation and co-design both among our own practices and with our communities.
Our Process: co-Interogation and sharing of epistemologies.
Over the fall we will be holding interdisciplinary knowledge exchange seminars, where we share our methodologies with each other, and our interests in this topic, towards interrogating components of interest to each other and integrating ideas into new enabling, shared approaches. From this series we will be exploring what may be “epistemologically formative” approach for exploring healthful work – how does tekne inform praxis and vice-versa, across levels of granularity, from policy to person doing a job? And knowing this, how move towards healthful praxis? where healthful embraces a range of values and actual conditions, from empowerment to physical wellbeing.
In terms of exploring work design, we propose a “co-scientist” approach – where our stakeholders – including ourselves – join us to explore how best to understand work practices, effects and how to experiment with new practices and technologies.
Our focus for a first pilot is to collaborate with our community: the University is one of the largest employers in Southampton; it has a diverse workforce, representative of the community at large including job types, demographics, contracts, autonomies.
With the support of the University, we will work with colleagues across all roles, respecting their time, to help us explore how to better understand how we can consider the radical proposition of re-designing work to be healthful in and of itself.
Healthful work isn’t just about physical issues from a poorly set up workstation – though that is part of it. It also includes, but is not limited to, value, autonomy, opportunity; it is informed by embodiments in technologies and policies, and the ways in which work is communicated and captured, as well as in expectations around location, availability, benefits and cultures.
Plainly to consider even beginning to design into this space, we need to think in new ways – together – to produce a potentially radically new knowledge to help us all feel and perform better; to achieve our aspirations within an equitable quality of life.
TEAM
The team working on this project has been developing this work together over the past 18months. It includes people from Engineering, Human Factors, Human Performance, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Science, Engineering, Health Sciences, Sociology, Economics, Psychology and Archaeology.
m.c. schraefel – Human Performance/Human Computer Interaction
m.c. (FBCS, CEng, CSCS, ACM Distinguished Member, RAEng Research Chair Alumna) is a professor of computer science and human performance at the University of Southampton who has PI’d and CO-I’d UKRI and international funding of over 30m GPB.
m.c. also leads the WellthLab (https://wellthlab.ac.uk) where the vision is to help #makeNormalBetter for all, at scale and the mission is to explore how interactive technologies in particular can be designed to help support that vision (these topics are also the subject of m.c.’s EPSRC established career fellowship). To support this aspiration, m.c. developed the inbodied interaction design approach to help explore how we can align our designs with how we have evolved to thrive, not just survive. m.c. in particular sees health not as prevention, or the absence of disease but as a fundamental right and quality of life. A key interdisciplinary question of the Lab, for example, is: how might work – across sectors and levels – be designed to support healthfulness out of the box, rather than being something from which we all need to recover? m.c. offered these questions as part of a keynote address to the ACM CHI Work conference in 2023. If these questions are of interest to you, Come join us! We are always open to collaborations in the wellthlab. As a bonus we will help anyone get their first pull up, guaranteed.
Dr Krishanthi Vithana – Economics – Human Capital
Krish is an Associate Professor in Accounting in Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. Her focus of research is Accounting for Human capital resource in organizational context. She also research in areas including accountability in relation to environmental social and governance performance and disclosure, market-based valuations on ESG and sustainability and the Real living wage. She has published her research in reputed academic journals including, Journal of Business Ethics, Accounting Forum, and The International Journal of Human Resource Management. Krish has been the principal investigator for the ESRC IAA funded research projects entitled “Investment case on real living wage accreditation” and “Incorporating the broad ESG agenda in investment analysis: case of climate related engagement”. Krish has actively engaged with industry partners including the Global Responsible Investment team of Aviva Investors, Living Wage Foundation and Platform Living wage financials. Krish has been awarded over 500,000 GPB in URKI and related funding since 2018.
Related research papers
- Vithana, K., Jayasekera, R., Choudhry, T., & Baruch, Y. (2023). Human Capital resource as cost or investment: A market-based analysis. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(6), 1213-1245.
- Vithana, K., Soobaroyen, T., & Ntim, C. G. (2021). Human resource disclosures in UK corporate annual reports: to what extent do these reflect organisational priorities towards labour?. Journal of Business Ethics, 169, 475-497.
- Vithana, K., Jayasekera, R., Choudhry, T., & Baruch, Y. (2018, July). HR as cost or investment: the distinction between short-vs. long-term focus of firm valuation. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2018, No. 1, p. 12902). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Dr Jane Parry,
Associate Professor of Work and Employment, Southampton Business School, University of Southampton
Jane is a sociologist of work and applied qualitative researcher, who has managed projects for a range of funding bodies and government departments for the past two decades, including DWP, ESRC, and JRF, raising over £1 million in research revenue across UKRI and beyond since 2017, with a track record of translating research into policy actions. Her research looks at how employment and careers are changing within different occupations, how work is being organised differently, as well as how disadvantage operates within labour markets. Academically, her reputation is reflected in her 1,194 Google Scholar citations (h-index of 15), being awarded the Sage prize for new writer for her first article in Work, Employment and Society, and her co-editorship of the prestigious Blackwell’s book A New Sociology of Work? She is currently co-editing the new Routledge textbook Sociology, Work and Organisations: A Global Context. She recently sat on the BEIS working group on the Future of Work and regularly works with Westminster and devolved administration policymakers to ensure that her research connects with current agendas. A former Parliamentary Academic Fellow for the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, she led the cross-institutional UKRI/ESRC Work after Lockdown research which explores changes around working preferences and organisational learning around pandemic-driven working from home. She is currently leading a project for Acas on flexible work in the post-pandemic landscape to inform their new Code of Practice and is also researching young people’s workspace experiences and needs in hybrid work. In her current role in the Department of HRM & Organisational Behaviour at Southampton Business School, she has previously been the Deputy Head of Department for Research and is currently Faculty Ethics Co-Chair, and sits on the advisory boards of the University’s cross-disciplinary Work Futures Research Centre (WFRC) and the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Action and Research (C-BEAR).
Related publications
Parry, J., Young, Z., Bevan, S., Veliziotis, M., Baruch, Y., Beigi, M., Bajorek, Z.,
Richards, S. and Tochia, C. (2022) Work After Lockdown: No going back: What we have learned working from home through the COVID-19 pandemic https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5654b537cea057c500f59e/t/621f392347040c7672afab19/1646213415975/WR_%237379_UoS_WorkAfterLockdownReport_am4_280222_v8.pdf
Parry, J., Young, Z., Bevan, S., Veliziotis, M., Baruch, Y., Beigi, M., Bajorek, Z., Salter, E. and Tochia, C. (2021) Working from Home under COVID-19 lockdown: Transitions and Tensions, Work After Lockdown https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5654b537cea057c500f59e/t/60143f05a2117e3eec3c3243/1611939604505/Wal+Bulletin+1.pdf
Anna Barney – Engineering
Professor Anna Barney has worked extensively on modelling and analysis of sounds produced in the body including speech, lung sounds and snoring in relation to diagnostic support an dprogress monitoring of disease. She has been funded for this work by research councils, including EPSRC, MRC and AHRC , and industry, including Intermune (now part of Roche) and Phillips Healthcare and worked across disciplinary boundaries collaborating with a range of engineers, scientists, clinical professionals , archaeologists and artists. Not least as Associate Vice President for Education, Anna is deeply engaged with exploring and developing interdisciplinary methods of knowledge building for challenging epistemic boundaries in interdisciplinary research.
Articulatory capacity of Neanderthals, a very recent and human-like fossil hominin A Barney, S Martelli, A Serrurier, J Steele, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367
“Velcro-type” crackles predict specific radiologic features of fibrotic interstitial lung disease G Sgalla, SLF Walsh, N Sverzellati, S Fletcher, S Cerri, B Dimitrov, … BMC pulmonary medicine 18, 1-7
The tongue in speech and feeding: Comparative articulatory modelling A Serrurier, P Badin, A Barney, LJ Boë, C Savariaux Journal of Phonetics 40 (6), 745-763
Motif discovery in speech: application to monitoring Alzheimer’s disease P Garrard, V Nemes, D Nikolic, A Barney, Current Alzheimer Research 14 (9), 951-959
Collaboration and consensus in listening A Barney, S Voegelin, Leonardo Music Journal 28, 82-87
Protocols of Listening: Reflections on the development of an interactive digital platform for cross-disciplinary sound research. S Voegelin, A Barney, MP Wright, P Stubbs, J Weaver, T Smith Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 3 (3), 224-254
Nick Maguire – Professorial Fellow (Enterprise) in Clinical Psychology
Nick trained at the University of Southampton in the UK, specialising in treatment and research with people with severe and enduring mental health problems.
He worked for a number of years in an NHS community mental health team, before moving on to develop a psychology service for entrenched rough sleepers in partnership with local homelessness charities. This led to clinical and research interests in psychological approaches to the complex issues experienced by people who are marginalised from mainstream health and social care.
He continues to research and teach at the University of Southampton around leadership in clinical psychology and psychologically informed environments in homelessness and is a founding director of a not-for-profit social enterprise delivering psychological interventions for homeless people and the people who serve them. He gives lectures and workshops on leadership and wellbeing in the workplace, focussing on the relationship between individual and environmental factors.
Fraser Sturt – Humanities: ARCHAEOLOGY
Fraser is an archaeologists with an interest in the interfaces between people, environment and society – how our context, what we do and how we do it shapes us, our society and planet. This has seen him work on projects looking at the past, present and future funded by the AHRC, NERC, RAEng and Lloyds Register Foundation. His particularly focus has been on how gather data from a variety of sources (both qualitative and quantitative) to better understand these relationships – to map out other ways we have been human in the past and as well as to model alternate pathways for the future.
Some relevant publications include:
Ashton, D., Gowland-Pryde, R., Roth, S. and Sturt, F., 2023. Creating the baseline: data relations and frictions of UK City of Culture evaluation. Arts and the Market.
Gourvenec, S., Sturt, F., Reid, E. and Trigos, F., 2022. Global assessment of historical, current and forecast ocean energy infrastructure: Implications for marine space planning, sustainable design and end-of-engineered-life management. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 154, p.111794.
Beresford-Jones, D.G., Friesem, D.E., Sturt, F., Pullen, A., Chauca, G., Moat, J., Gorriti, M., Maita, P.K., Joly, D., Huaman, O. and Lane, K.J., 2022. Insights into changing coastlines, environments and marine hunter-gatherer lifestyles on the Pacific coast of South America from the La Yerba II shell midden, Río Ica estuary, Peru. Quaternary Science Reviews, 285, p.107509.
Cadwallader, L., Beresford-Jones, D.G., Sturt, F.C., Pullen, A.G. and Arce Torres, S., 2018. Doubts about How the Middle Horizon Collapsed (ca. AD 1000) and other insights from the looted cemeteries of the Lower Ica Valley, South Coast of Peru. Journal of Field Archaeology, 43(4), pp.316-331.
Romanowska, I., Gamble, C., Bullock, S. and Sturt, F., 2017. Dispersal and the Movius line: testing the effect of dispersal on population density through simulation. Quaternary International, 431, pp.53-63.
Richard Gomer – Computer Science: HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION
Dr Richard Gomer is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and an early-career researcher. He has worked extensively on human-system interaction design, including design for meaningful consent, personal data management, and value-sensitive design. He brings design thinking approaches to tackle difficult interdisciplinary problems, often drawing on Activity Theory and Value-Sensitive Design as lenses to explore meaning and values within multi-stakeholder activity systems. He is interested in how values and meaning are ‘folded in’ to digital tools, including how work practices and work culture shape, and are shaped by, the digital tools of work.
Richard has worked on numerous interdisciplinary projects as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer, including the joint EPSRC-ESRC funded ‘Meaningful Consent’ project (economics, computer science, HCI), the Horizon 2020 QROWD project (transport engineering, computer science, HCI), and the PETRAS-funded UMIS project (law, computer science, transport engineering, HCI). Since appointment as a lecturer, he has been a co-investigator on projects worth over £460,000.
Relevant publications include
S. Zileli, R. Gomer, and m. c. schraefel, ‘Exploring the design space for Crowdsourcing Journey eXperience’, Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544549.3585818
J. Andres, R. Gomer, M. Jones, and m.c. schraefel, ‘Body as Starting Point 5: Exploring the Inbodied Interaction Design Framework – New Methodologies in Interactive Health Design,’ Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491101.3503707
R. Gomer and m.c. schraefel, ‘Meaning, motive and reconfiguration: could Activity Theory provide design directions for personal fitness technology?’, presented at the Body as Starting Point 4: CHI2021 Workshop on inbodied interaction (07/05/21), May 2021. Available: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/449335/
R. C. Gomer and E. Simperl, ‘Trusts, co-ops, and crowd workers: Could we include crowd data workers as stakeholders in data trust design?’, Data & Policy, vol. 2, p. e20, Dec. 2020, doi: 10.1017/dap.2020.21.
m. c. schraefel, R. Gomer, E. Gerding, and C. Maple, ‘Rethinking transparency for the Internet of Things’, book chapter in Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020, pp. 100–116. doi: 10.4337/9781788972000.00012.
S. Snow, D. Filipczuk, S. Viller, and R. Gomer, ‘Design Jam as a Pedagogy: Teaching Design Thinking to Computer Science Students at Scale’, in Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, Fremantle WA Australia: ACM, Dec. 2019, pp. 128–137. doi: 10.1145/3369457.3369468.
E. Maddalena et al., ‘Hybrid Human Machine workflows for mobility management’, in Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference, in WWW ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, May 2019, pp. 102–109. doi: 10.1145/3308560.3317056.
Grants (all as Co-I)
Patient And Stakeholder Perspectives On Health Data Collection, Use And Sharing: Foundations For Data Driven Improvements In Prosthetic Care. Funded by NIHR, 2023-2025. £149,888
DemoPlay – a game for reimagining democracy. Funded by Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities. 2022-2023. £14,340
User Trust In Mobility-as-a-Service IoT Ecosystem (UMIS). Funded by the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, 2021-2023. £298,885
Katie Plant – Engineering/Human Factors – SocioTechnical Systems
Dr Katherine Plant (C.ErgHF) is an Associate Professor in Human Factors Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. A psychologist by training, her research focuses on the application of systems-based methods to understand how sociotechnical systems function and how individuals make decisions in the context of the systems they work in, to inform the design of better systems. Katherine has primarily worked in transportation, authoring the books ‘Distributed Cognition and Reality: How pilots and crews make decisions’ (CRC Press, 2016), Driver Distraction: A sociotechnical systems approach (CRC Press, 2018), and Human Factors on the Flight Deck: A Practical Guide for Design, Modelling and Evaluation (CRC Press, 2023), and has over 70 peer-reviewed publications in discipline leading journals. More recently, she has demonstrated the value of human factors approaches in healthcare application, as the human factors lead in an interdisciplinary team for the Diagnostic AI System for Robot-Assisted A&E Triage (DAISY) project and was part of the team shortlisted for the HSJ national Patient Safety Awards for Quality Improvement Initiative of the Year (supporting women/birthing people and their families who experience a caesarean birth under general anaesthetic, Sept-23). She has led or contributed to a research portfolio of over £5m, from funders including Innovate UK, EPSRC, UKRI, Network Rail, and Road Safety Trust. She is a founding member of the ‘Close the Data Gap’ working group, which is highlighting the issue of gender data gaps in research and practice.
Related publications:
Salmon, P.M. & Plant, K.L. 2022. Distributed situation awareness: from awareness in individuals and teams to the awareness of technologies, sociotechnical systems, and societies, Applied Ergonomics, 98.
Plant, K.L. & Fendley, M.E. 2021. Human factors and the ergonomics and the response to COVID-19, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing and Service Industries, 31(4), 329-332.
Foster, C.J., Plant, K.L., & Stanton, N.A. 2020. A Delphi study of human factors methods for the evaluation of adaptation in safety-related organisations, Safety Science, 131.
Plant, K.L. & Stanton, N.A. 2016. The development of the Schema World Action Research Method (SWARM) for the elicitation of perceptual cycle data. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 17(4), 376-401.
Pauline Leonard Sociology of Work and Organizational Change
Professor Pauline Leonard is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Economic, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Southampton where she is also Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange and Deputy Director of the Web Science Institute. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts and the Alan Turing Institute, and a Founder Member of the Work Futures Research Centre, University of Southampton. She is internationally recognised for her longstanding research interests in work and organisational change, diversity and inequality, for which she has received a continuous stream of funding from the UKRI, ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, as well as charities and business. Her research spans international contexts and industrial sectors to penetrate how work and change impact with our social identities, and with what outcomes. Her most recent research explores the impact of new technologies on our working lives, and she is currently working on projects funded by the UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub on Human Robot Teams and Trust in Autonomous Security Systems.
Related Publications
Leonard, P. and Tyers, R. (2021) Engineering the revolution? Imagining the role of new digital technologies in infrastructure work futures New Technology, Work and Employment 38, 2 291-310
Leonard, P. and Tochia, C. (2022) from episteme to techne: Crafting responsible innovation in trustworthy autonomous systems research practice Journal of Responsible Technology 11
Parnell, K., Pope, K.,Sturgess, E.,Hayward, R., Leonard, P. Madeira, Revell, K. (2022) ‘It’s a Man’s World’: a gender-equitable scoping review of gender, transportation and work Ergonomics, 65, 11, — 1537-1553
Mandy Fader Health Sciences
Mandy Fader is Professor of Continence Technology at the University of Southampton. Trained as a nurse Mandy began her academic career with a research post at University College London (UCL) followed by several years in the clinical continence team for Bloomsbury Health Authority. In 1995 she joined the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at UCL and working on a programme of continence product research, completing her PhD in 2001. In 2004 she joined the University of Southampton’s Bladder and Bowel management group and leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers focusing on research into improving quality of life through continence products and devices.
Mandy is co-chair for the International Consultation on Incontinence Management with Products panel/chapter and co-founder of the user-focused evidence-based Continence Product Advisor website www.continenceproductadvisor.org. She is consulting editor for the US Wound Ostomy and Continence Nursing journal and has been a Trustee of the International Continence Society (ICS) 2009-2012, and an editor for the Cochrane Incontinence group. She is the Chief Investigator for the NIHR MultiCath programme which aims to develop and test the use of reusable intermittent catheters and has a particular interest in developing sustainable continence products.
Mandy has been both Head of School and Dean of Health Sciences from 2016-2021. As Associate Vice-President for Strategic Major Projects since 2019 and member of the University Executive Board she led the university Future Ways of Working programme which aimed to enable successful hybrid working through the testing of pilots and models. Mandy is a board member of the Wessex Academic Health Sciences Network Board and a governor of University Hospitals Southampton.