Beyond Riding: Passenger Engagement with Driver Labor through Gamified Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gamified interactions during ridesharing can increase passenger awareness of driver conditions, promote responsible consumption, and foster solidarity, through workshops with drivers and passengers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to enhance passenger engagement and awareness of driver labor through gamified in-ride interactions, informing future design of human-centered ridehail technologies.

Findings

Gamified interactions reveal passenger knowledge gaps about ridehail conditions.

They prompt reflection and perception shifts regarding passenger power and responsibility.

Drivers prefer immersive, contextualized experiences that foster solidarity.

Abstract

Modern cities increasingly rely on ridesharing services for on-demand transportation, which offer consumers convenience and mobility across the globe. However, these marketed consumer affordances give rise to burdens and vulnerabilities that drivers shoulder alone, without adequate infrastructures for labor regulations or consumer-led advocacy. To effectively and sustainably advance protections and oversight for drivers, consumers must first be aware of the labor, logistics and costs involved with ridehail driving. To motivate consumers to practice more socially responsible consumption behaviors and foster solidarity with drivers, we explore the potential for gamified in-ride interactions to facilitate engagement with real (and lived) driver experiences. Through nine workshops with 19 drivers and 15 passengers, we surface how gamified in-ride interactions revealed passenger knowledge gaps around latent ridehail conditions, prompt reflection and shifts in perception of their relative power and consumption behaviors, and highlight drivers' preferences for creating more immersive and contextualized service experiences, and identify opportunities to design safe and appropriate passenger-driver interactions that motivate solidarity with drivers. In sum, we advance conceptual understandings of in-ride social and managerial relations, demonstrate potential for future worker advocacy in algorithmically-managed labor, and offer design guidelines for more human-centered workplace technologies.