Modern cities across the globe increasingly rely on ridehail services for on-demand transportation and mobility. But for drivers, such marketed affordances give rise to hidden burdens and vulnerabilities that evade the oversight of consumers and regulators. To effectively advance worker protections and motivate more socially responsible practices, consumers must understand the realistic labor, logistics and costs involved with ridehail driving. Through nine workshops with 19 drivers and 15 passengers, we explore the potential for gamified in-ride interactions to facilitate engagement with real (and lived) driver experiences, surfacing passenger knowledge gaps around latent ridehail conditions, prompting reflection and shifts in perception of their relative power and consumption behaviors, highlighting drivers' preferences for creating more immersive and contextualized service experiences, and identifying design opportunities for safe and appropriate passenger-driver interactions that motivate solidarity. In sum, we advance conceptual understandings of in-ride social and managerial relations, demonstrate potential for citizen-led advocacy in algorithmically-managed labor, and offer design guidelines for more human-centered workplace technologies.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems