Thesis Statement

User-centered digital interfaces between an employee, management, and an inherently surveilling eco-system of workplace applications can help uphold the dignity, earn the trust, and evoke the altruism of an employee via screen-based interactions that re-enforce transparency, employee agency, co-determination, and negotiation.

Abstract

More and more, businesses are looking to their massive stores of data regarding workplace behavior as an opportunity to better understand their organization, monitor its performance, and optimize its workforce and processes.

This is not a new notion, but the present revival of optimization based on rigorous, quantitative observation brings with it an unprecedented amount and granularity of data. Furthermore, technologies and services are beginning to surface that are capable of trawling massive data stores and building ontologies for the purpose of business strategy.

However, such systems bare cultural connotations of oppression, coercion, and privacy invasion—rightfully so, given the unflinchingly bottom-line driven climate of US business, the widening class gap, and daily headlines regarding the NSA surveillance program. If workforce surveillance is going to be genuinely successful, one of the primary challenges it must negotiate is that of an established and expanding distrust amidst employees.

My thesis project is a digital user interface prototype for a workforce tracking system that affords users the ability to manage their level of participation. The design of this UI supports and manifests principles of transparency, privacy, human autonomy, co-determination, and negotiation. The hypothesis of my project is a user interface that is transparent and democratic in its interactions regarding workplace surveillance will result in users being more responsible regarding their personal data as well as more altruistic in volunteering personal data for use by their organization.