Productive visions: Prelude to a cultural history of fatigue

Prior to today’s excursions in computer vision and artificial intelligence, corporate consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were among the first to use visual tools to assist companies in improving productivity goals. Their time and motion studies - culminating in the visual record of the chronocyclegraph - pioneered new ways of seeing and optimising the physical movement of workers in domestic and industrial settings. This talk provides an introduction to the longer history of business and management applications of vision technologies which forms the backdrop of new collaborative ARC Discovery project, A Cultural History of Workplace Fatigue. This research draws connections between early applications of photography for corporate benefit and the growing use of AI for employee and consumer monitoring today.

 

Melissa Gregg is Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol, jointly appointed at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and the Business School. A former Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, she is the author of six books and over 60 scholarly articles on workplace culture, corporate sustainability, and the social dimensions of digital technology. At Intel, she led the first industry investment of its kind in social science and engineering collaboration across five US universities, before directing User Experience for multiple client platform generations and founding Intel’s first sustainability product team for the CTO. Her current research focuses on the social and environmental impacts of high performance computing investments, and ecocentric possibilities for AI.