MRes Design Grand Challenge: Futuring Care for Women in the Gig Economy
Summary
The Royal College of Art (RCA) established a college-wide, four-week Grand Challenge on Design for Safety to explore what strategic role design can play in a post COVID-19 pandemic society through the lenses of 7 themes (care, future, leadership, NGI, health, resilience, truth).
Our research focuses on ‘care’ and ‘futures’ and inquires how design can speculate safety and care, both as a discipline as well as a design strategy. By focusing on the lack of care the Gig Economy has for its workers and in particular women, we identified how failures of the food delivery sector creates unsafe working conditions for female workers. This is for example indicated by the lack of missing support for women when working in unsafe neighborhoods or a lack of safe zones for resting between orders, exchanging safer routes among co-workers and having access to washrooms.
‘GiGi’ tackles this issue through a physical and digital community hub that empowers women to develop beyond the current limitations of being (self-) employed in the food delivery sector. It aims to support female food delivery bikers to decouple from the sole dependency on algorithm-driven assignments of delivery orders. In the long-run, GiGi wants to develop women into innovators and entrepreneurs who will envision and realize how we will craft, deliver and share food in the future.
GiGi is a community driven support network for the future, operating as a NGO. It provides a physical and digital ecosystem and community for female delivery workers. It aims to break the dominance of big players (corporations) that dictate the market and the rules of engagement. It provides training services for women to get accustomed and use latest technologies (such as piloting a drone for food delivery) and offers a platform to exchange and support.
The goal is to obliterate current gender-based disadvantages women have and advance them from being dependent workers to becoming fore thinkers of the future of food and eating. Further, the female delivery bikers can grow into active contributors to imagining new, sustainable ways of food delivery (both in environmental and societal aspects).
On the Target Group of Female Delivery Bikers in the Gig Economy
The Gig Economy is an industry sector in which workers are typically self-employed and receive their work assignments or orders from a digital platform they contracted with. The term ‘gig’ refers to the loose, irregular venues or performances in the event industry which are also characterized by diverse and insecure income streams for those engaged in it. Typical representatives of platforms are companies such as AirBnB, Uber Eats or Food Panda.
We identified a lack of care in the gig economy, specifically in the food delivery sector:
- Strong increase in traffic accidents with delivery bikers involved
- The rise of food delivery orders caused exponential more waste generated
- The gender pay gap in the gig economy almost doubled
- Female workers are two times more exposed to unpaid care responsibilities and are more exposed to assault
Our research thus focuses on how design can design for safety and care by speculating the lack of safe zones for female food delivery bikers, who work in cosmopolitan cities.
Futuring the Food Delivery Sector for Women
Future Forecasting aims to think beyond current trends and technology development to focus on important future visions and to detect weak signals to investigate further. Using this method was key to envision and develop our final solution proposal of GiGi Hub. It helped us to think out-of-the-box and question future implications of the problem space we looked at.
Research Methods (Selection)
We identified the key issues of gender inequality and lack of safety and care by using a matrix of key issues in care and in design futures.
Illustrating the future journey of our target group protagonist helped us to envision and validate a possible future.
Endnotes
This work and its outcomes are the result of collaborative group work, all authors contributed equally.
Specific acknowledgements:
- GiGi Logo Design: Xin Wu
- GiGi Wordmark, GiGi Business Model: Alexandra Matz
- Storyboard Illustration: Yanning Zheng
- 3D Rendering of GiGi Hub: Yanning Zheng and Xin Wu
- Service Blueprint for GiGi, Visual Language of Project: Michael Peter
