Design Justice 2025 'Idle Time Is Theft' Zine

This zine was created for the Module 'INM317 Design Justice' as part of the masters programme 'Human-Computer Interaction Design' at City St George's, University of London (2024-2025). This deposit includes three files: an A4 three-page print-ready PDF of the zine; an A4 twelve-page PDF for viewing the zine online; and a text file with instructions on how to print and fold the print-ready zine.<br><br>Abstract:<br><br><i>'Idle Time Is Theft'</i> is a 12-page folio that critiques workplace surveillance through the lens of Ursula Franklin’s concept of prescriptive technologies and the Design Justice Network Principles. Framing productivity monitoring software as a form of control that enforces compliance and erodes worker autonomy, the zine explores how such technologies disproportionately harm remote workers, gig workers, neurodivergent people, disabled people, and those in low-trust workplaces. It reveals how so-called productivity tools reflect and reproduce hierarchies of power and deepen structural inequities. The zine concludes with a speculative design intervention that imagines counter-systems rooted in trust and collective agency, as a form of resistance to surveillance capitalism that treats every moment of human life as extractable value.