Creativity Greenhouse: Family Rituals 2.0

Work can demand time away from home. For some employees being away from home might be a few days on a frequent basis, for others it may be much longer periods. Being away from home can impact on family life and participation in family rituals, creating a challenge to managing the competing demands of work and life. Information and communication technologies assist in overcoming the barrier of distance, between the absent worker and family.

This research will focus on mobile workers across a number of different employment sectors (for example, technology, construction, and tourism industries, and the armed forces). It will look at both family and organisational practices.

The research will find out what mobile workers and their family members consider to be family rituals (both secular and religious) and why it is important for these family members to share these moments together. Specifically, it will seek to understand what those rituals might be in different types of family setting. It will look at the role of existing digital technologies in supporting families to engage in such shared ritual activities.

The research will also explore, through a series of design-led activities, what the challenges and opportunities are for technology use in these family settings. And then, in close collaboration with the families, the project will design and develop some novel prototype digital technologies. This approach will use both high- and low-tech designs which participating families will live with and use, helping us to further explore the role of potential technologies in supporting remote engagement in family rituals.

Alongside working with families, the research will also find out how organisations consider the work-life balance of their mobile employees, and how these organisations may assist in helping a family to connect whilst the employee is away from home. These organisations will be invited to attend a workshop at the end of the project, to learn about the research findings, and debate how the outcomes should be taken forward in future research and their potential impact on the organisations.

Family Rituals 2.0 brings a new multidisciplinary perspective to the topic of work-life balance, by examining how technology can enhance connection to family rituals for those family members who are located elsewhere due to work commitments (mobile workers).

The research impact will firstly enrich academic knowledge on work-life balance with a new multidisciplinary perspective on this topic; secondly, promote new understandings for stakeholders (e.g. employers, trade associations, support groups, etc) on work-life balance for mobile workers; and thirdly, demonstrate the technological opportunities that can support mobile workers through design probes and technological prototyping.

The creation of a multidisciplinary research group through this funding will develop new conceptual framings of work-life balance and digital technologies, and promote innovative research methodologies to examine the topic. The investment will benefit the career development of early career researcher through knowledge and skills building, and shape future research funding bids.

The impact to the wider academic community will be delivered through dissemination to the academic community. Findings will be published in a series of high quality peer reviewed journal papers and presented at technology, design, and social science academic conferences. Concurrently findings from the research will be dissemination through the work-life balance network.

The societal impact will be generated by engaging stakeholders within the research process, and packaging research knowledge appropriately to foster reflection and debate on the research topic.

The end of project workshop will be an awareness raising event with a diverse set of stakeholders, not only to deliver research perspectives on family life and work-life balance, but also to demonstrate emergent technological prototypes. The research team see this event as springboard for future research and development relationships, thus ensuring a research legacy beyond the duration of the proposed funding period.

The team has integrated non-academic dissemination into the work plan to engage a broader audience by publishing short articles in generalist and interest publications.

The technological impact will be made through the relationship between the social research methods and technological prototyping. Here the depth understandings of existing technology use by mobile workers to connect to family members, and identification of problems in existing communication offers, will be translated to develop solutions that respond to real life problems. The research intends that combination of social and technical knowledge developed will offer opportunities for future technological development beyond the project timeframe.