Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley
In this paper we explore the idea of a system of care through a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in typical modes of systems management. Care is what knowing in this system is for. We examine how participants in the system navigate different epistemic bases of their work, focusing on how care work and information work intertwine. How is this work practiced and known? And how could we, as design researchers, use these practices to design systems of care? In service of these goals, we expand the notion of care work toward care of non-human actors as well as that of people. We focus particularly on the roles of automation and the risks automation presents for care. In a moment of increased automation in the workplace, what happens to the care of people and things? We argue that the systemic aspect of care, operating at multiple scales toward people and things alilke, is important for maintaining the goods the organization seeks to produce. And we propose a list of critical questions to ask when designing new systems to shape their orientation toward care.
In the logic of care exchanging stories is a moral activity in and of itself. But moral activities do not restrict themselves to talk, to verbal exchanges. They also come in physical forms. (Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care, 77)
INTRODUCTION
The radio crackles to life with the voice of a bus operator: “I slid tryin’ to make my turn onto Horsetooth and now I’ve got the median in front of me. I need assistance to back up.”
Inside a low set of office buildings and garages painted in tan and beige, several people sit in a control room in front of telephones, radios, and screens. These bus dispatchers are responsible for the operation of all the TransitService buses for this small city in the Western United States. It is clear to everyone present there that the call from this bus operator is potentially serious. But no one in the dispatch center has a clear idea of what has actually happened out at the intersection.
After a few beats of silence, the staff spring into action. One dispatcher summons a road supervisor to a special radio channel. Another asks the operator for more details, finding out that the bus is blocking two whole lanes. The dispatchers work to sort out the situation and find help. Twelve minutes later the situation is resolved. Once a spotter arrives on the scene it takes the bus about 10 seconds to back up and return to its normal route. But the process by which this result was achieved is deeply instructive for how the system operates.
During these 12 minutes, the road supervisor started a long trek across town in rush-hour traffic to get to the scene. Another bus operator who had just returned to base after finishing his shift was sent back out toward the incident in a company car with the thought that he might get there sooner than the supervisor. A dispatcher called the police to inform them of the incident. The dispatchers and the bus operator deliberated about whether it was safe to put out cones and to let a passenger off the bus while it was sitting in that location. The very reason the bus could not back up was itself for the safety of others: operators in this system are not allowed to back up a bus without a spotter, not because it is impossible, but because it is considered too risky for others in the vicinity. In the end it was yet another bus operator returning home from his shift who was first on the scene and provided the decisive help. And that was not by chance—a dispatcher knew this operator, and knew when, where, and how he would be returning home. That dispatcher called him directly to ask for his assistance.
As this event demonstrates, TransitService, like many service organizations, is distributed in space and deeply interdependent with infrastructures beyond its sole control. Corporations today are increasingly designing large-scale service systems—from ubiquitous electronic communications to expanding ride-sharing—that are interlocked with infrastructures managed by other parties. And service work within these systems is increasingly automated or eliminated, often displaced onto the users themselves. But we see in this particular mobility system a counter-argument to the prevailing logics of efficiency.
The overarching motivation for solving this problem was clearly to get the bus moving again. But throughout, there was a marked attention to the care of employees, equipment, and members of the public, all legitimate and important work that service organizations perform that is not directly business labor.
We selected the dispatch center as a site for our research with the objective to understand how distributed mobility systems operate, and how they might operate using increasingly automated vehicles. We were especially interested in the role and function of centralized control centers, here, Dispatch. Orchestrating the movement of people and vehicles around a city requires gathering information from a variety of perspectives: from the ground-level viewpoints of buses to the overview visions of dispatchers, to everything in between. The data that are gathered and tracked allow a mobility system to operate in a world that can be known only imperfectly and at a distance, mediated through recording devices, radios, and employees. But we found that the self-contained logic of information systems that reinforces practices of measurement and data collection—feeding the system with yet more information—is not enough to ensure that the goals behind the system can be met. In other words, information is not enough for mobility to be achieved. Another system is also necessary, and serves as the lifeblood of mobility services provided to people and publics. We describe this parallel and intertwined system as a system of care.
The system of care strongly contributes to the achievement of mobility: it organizes and shapes the purposes of knowing and measuring in this site. Actors seek to know the system in order to care for it and the people it serves. And this care overflows traditional regimes of measurement, prompting questions about how care itself can be known, assured, or documented (Strathern 2011, Adams 2015). Ethnographers expect to find ways, both helpful and harmful, in which work practice does not match up with regimes of measurement (Suchman 1995, Cefkin, Thomas and Blomberg 2007). But we extend this perspective to show that these practices may in fact become part of a systematic organizational approach to carrying out activity in the world, with implications for the design of increasingly automated service systems.
For us as researchers, seeking to conceptualize how systems to perform mobility-work could be automated, the systemic nature of care confounds traditional ideas of how this labor could be formalized into computational procedures.
This paper is a call to ethnographic researchers, designers and strategists to take seriously the multifaceted system by which caring for people and things happens. In this paper we raise specific questions about what it means to design for care. Our particular interest lies in ensuring that increasing automation does not erase these desirable properties of caring systems.
DATA AND METHODS
The authors conducted one week of intensive fieldwork in the bus system of a medium-sized city in the Western United States. We collected fieldnotes in the dispatch center, during ride-alongs on buses, and in a number of staff meetings. We interviewed key staff members. And we collected photographs and hours of video and audio recordings per day in the dispatch center and on bus rides. Our overall engagement with the site was somewhat longer, including several calls in advance to scope the observation and identify useful sites to observe, and some follow-up to collect more documents to help us understand the service and its activities.
We analyzed the material with attention to how workers in this site come to know about the world and guide their actions as part of the bus system, with particular focus on the situated purposes and meanings of these actions. What types of knowledge are valued over others? Why are certain kinds of information collected? What is the affective engagement of employees in the work? Additionally, we analyzed the work-practice dimensions of the material, particularly how employees work together to solve problems. Methodologically, the authors transcribed and coded relevant selections of conversations for these themes, and performed video and interaction analysis using collected audiovisual data. To supplement our own data collection we were given the Operations Manual to study, and have returned to it to put what we saw in context.
LITERATURES
In the ethnographic literature, care work appears as processual and relational work between people. Our notion of the system of care builds from Annemarie Mol’s concept of the logic of care (Mol 2008) and extends the way that care work is thought about in large, distributed organizations. In healthcare (Mol’s subject matter), choice appears under the guise of individual decisions and care is achieved over time by informing, providing support, cajoling, working with, or otherwise providing assistance to patients. Mol and others have found that care work is commonly not acknowledged by professional standards and measurement systems even though it is critical to the functioning of organizations (Nardi and Engeström 1999, Star and Strauss 1999, Bowker and Star 1999). Furthermore, care labor often occurs outside the market frame, and is uncompensated, situated in the home, and provided primarily by women (Cowan 1983), though some of this typically household labor is increasingly corporatized and built into business organizations seeking to provide for greater portions of their employees’ needs (English-Lueck and Avery 2014).
Service labor in the market sphere is often rendered invisible or otherwise “veiled” (Kreeger and Holloway 2008). Excavating the real content of the work day unearths all manner of labor that is illegible to official reports and not present in job requirements (Suchman 1995). But making it visible in order to gain official recognition is also a fraught enterprise,1 and measuring its value may be difficult or even impossible (Bryson et al. 2003). The services literature shows one dark side to making this work too visible: the routinization of service work. While standardized practices provide a sometimes-welcome buffer for employees from genuine interactions of care, they concomitantly reduce the space for individual problem solving and judgment (Leidner 1993).
We see the system of care as operating at multiple scales, for people and objects alike. Relational care work is closely tied to the work of customization, maintenance and repair (Star 1999, Darr 2008, Jackson 2014, Anand 2015). And all of these may be part of care work oriented toward larger agglomerations of people and things alike: from users to communities and publics that may be more diffuse and therefore less visible (Amirebrahimi 2006). Numerous studies have shown how transplanted technical systems may worsen rather than improve conditions if not maintained (for instance Mavhunga 2014), suggesting an emphasis on simplicity and reparability of technical interventions (De Laet and Mol 2000). Maintenance is therefore a key entry point for practices of care toward non-humans, which may yet expand beyond material repair into responsible use, preemptive action, and continued monitoring.2 Within infrastructure studies (Parks and Starosielski 2015, Larkin 2013) it is maintenance that allows technical systems to “just work” and be a largely stable and invisible background to a “modern” life (Edwards 2002, Anand 2015). Care and maintenance are particularly interesting here when they involve stewardship of a third space like the roadway, which is beyond the direct responsibility of either an organization or its customers.
HOW SYSTEM OF CARE OPERATES FOR DIFFERENT ROLES
Mol argues that the logic of choice is a neoliberal, modernist logic that puts the responsibility for the fate of the individual squarely on his or her own shoulders. So while it aligns with commonly held Western cultural values, it also represents a systematic abrogation of responsibility for individual people, communities, and networks of people and things. The logic of care, on the other hand, involves sustained relationships of responsibility, even if via some level of force. We see a similar dichotomy within the service organization, between care and efficiency. Efficiency, like choice, sounds appealing, but falls short by a similar abrogation of responsibility.
Many important facets of the service and infrastructure-related work described below are not easily amenable to measurement, and measurement tends to distort labor over time to focus more and more on what is measured rather than what is not (Adams 2015). Since so much care of people and things is hard to measure, it seems to face a great risk of being left by the wayside by a focus on automation and efficiency.
To refocus the discussion on the values of care within an organization requires us to look for instances of care in the process of work. What are the signs that this care is happening? How do people in this site know care? Care may be written into policies, procedures, and mission statements, but unless these are lived and practiced they might remain as just so many words. While regimes of accountability seek to provide quantitative evidence for certain kinds of care, from daily checks of bus tires to multi-year infrastructure projects, the caring properties of the system depend on the performance of values that are difficult or perhaps fundamentally impossible to account for by procedural means. Here we attempt to account for them ethnographically, by looking at the meaningful performances and narratives of employees in various roles within the service system: bus operators, field personnel, dispatchers, and support staff.
Bus Operators
Hold on, hold on please! A loud beeping commences as the bus’s ramp lowers into place.
Hey Walter, how you doin’? You get to go first! says the driver, as he gets out of his seat to assist.
An elderly man with a walker gets on Bus 5 and moves toward priority seating.
Haven’t seen you in a couple weeks.
You good? The operator asks as the man gets settles in his seat. Does this [the walker] have brakes? The operator finds and sets the brakes.
Where you getting’ off? … Just ridin’ around?
In many ways, driving is not the core activity of a bus operator. As our informants suggested to us, “anyone can be taught to drive a bus.” This is not to say that safe operation does not require high levels of skill and attention. And indeed the operator’s manual tells that “The most important element of your job as a transit operator is Safety First” (Operations Manual, p. 159). While safe driving is of paramount importance when on the road, even at the cost of other metrics like on-time performance, it is not seen in practice as the distinguishing feature of the operator within this organization.
As routine interactions like the one above show—interactions which happen day-in and day-out for TransitService operators—the role of bus driver is as much about making people safe and comfortable as it is about driving. Operators are responsible for the critical work of aiding customers with mobility issues, such as helping passengers with walkers or wheelchairs board the bus and get secured into the appropriate restraints. This labor combines physical assistive activities that might be automated by a specially-designed vehicle, and communicative work that would be far more difficult, especially when customers themselves have issues communicating.
In the hiring practices of the organization itself, the position of bus operator is primarily a customer service role. The critical skilled task for the operator is interacting with people, a skill that at least some of our informants believed was innate and un-teachable. So they would pass up applicants with existing commercial driving licenses in favor of people with more service experience who would nevertheless require training to be certified as a vehicle operator. Operators must be able to attend to others, chat, cajole, assist, maintain order, and defuse situations. They, like the assistants in a store or the instructors in a classroom, are the stewards of the people who enter their space.
These interactional and service roles set up the operator as more than just a driver. She is a local information source, a help line, and a custodian of public trust, and in that way she joins the ranks of care workers. Operators are instructed by procedures to perform some tasks even when the bus is done for the day, such as to transport stranded passengers if their destination is on the “deadhead” route back to the garage.
Figure 1. Safety is so important that even the restrooms are not an escape from messages about safe driving. But much of what operators do on the road is properly customer service. (Here we have obscured this operator’s face and the service’s logo.)
Moreover, the orientation toward care configures other kinds of work that operators end up doing, much of which is not required by official procedures. For instance, operators may call in to dispatch to request welfare checks or emergency services for incapacitated people at stops or by the side of the road. They also report issues with roadway infrastructure such as street lights and traffic signals that are out, detour signs down in the roadway, and signage issues at bus stops. The operator-bus unit acts as a kind of roving information system, oriented toward service to the community. This kind of informal effort and attention contributes to making the world outside the bus a safer place.
Operator roles blend the care of people on and around their vehicles with the care of infrastructures and vehicles themselves. They are looking and listening for problems or potential problems, even ones that do not directly impact their own position or even the TransitService organization. In practice, the operators’ commitments to care appear to run deeper than what is regulated or required, and at times occur outside of existing regimes of measurement. As the sensory organs of the transit system, they sometimes do not know the significance of the things they report. They do not see the whole picture. But their attention and conscientious reporting are a key part of how the rest of that system, including road supervisors and dispatchers, knows what is going on.