Keep Assembling and Carry On: A Satirical View on Solving the Workforce Problem through Cognitively Impaired Labor

Abstract

Western economies are facing a workforce crisis in which many low-paid job posts, especially in manufacturing, remain unfilled. This has a negative impact on the economy which hinders industrial growth. To counteract this, we present an assistive system that enables cognitively impaired users to effectively assemble automotive parts within eight-hour shifts. While assistive systems have been studied extensively in HCI, our work is the first to explore their economic benefits. We contribute the design and implementation of an augmented reality system that provides just-in-time visual cues to assure optimal production pace. The system also provides incentives and necessary enforcement to optimize productivity. This satirical work shows how future assistive systems could ignore the rights of workers when ethical aspects are not considered in the design process. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI’19, May 2019, Glasgow UK © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9999-9/18/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 Keep Assembling and Carry On: A Satirical View on Solving the Workforce Problem through Cognitively Impaired Labor CHI’19, May 2019, Glasgow UK