What does “good work” look like when your “boss” is an app and your “workplace” is the city streets?

Around the world, digital labour platforms are reshaping livelihoods, yet the people most affected – the platform workers – are rarely the ones shaping the conversation. This prompted a deeper inquiry: in a rapidly expanding platform economy, what does it truly take for to ensure that gig workers technology that are based on digital algorithm is not being bias nor unfair to the workers?

To explore this, ThinkPlace supported The Tony Blair Institute of Change to take a participatory design approach to uncover the lived experiences of gig workers across four countries: Singapore, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Kenya. We shadowed food delivery riders through their daily routes to gain first-hand experiences on the pressures and micro-decisions shaping their behasviours. We conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focused group discussions with both location-based and web-based workers to define what fairness, transparency, and good ‘gig’ work means to them.

“The restaurant was closed. There was nothing to pick up. The customer complained. I was penalised by the algorithm, in money and time.”

By placing the realities of the workers, we surface issues that otherwise could have been overlook by traditional desktop review and surveys. The insights led us to surface early discussion on how algorithm and technology must not forget to emphasise on fairness, and control that users need to have.