Revisiting Worker-Centered Design: Tensions, Blind Spots, and Action Spaces

TL;DR

This paper critically examines Worker-Centered Design in the food delivery industry, revealing tensions, blind spots, and proposing pathways to enhance its practical impact and relevance.

Contribution

It offers a four-lens analytical framework to identify challenges in WCD implementation and proposes a Diagnostic-Generative pathway to improve its effectiveness in real-world contexts.

Findings

Identifies conflicts across labor chains in WCD implementations.

Highlights limited political-economic understanding among designers.

Proposes a pathway to address labor conflicts and institutional reframing.

Abstract

Worker-Centered Design (WCD) has gained prominence over the past decade, offering researchers and practitioners ways to engage worker agency and support collective actions for workers. Yet few studies have systematically revisited WCD itself, examining its implementations, challenges, and practical impact. Through a four-lens analytical framework that examines multiple facets of WCD within food delivery industry, we identify critical tensions and blind spots from a Multi-Laborer System perspective. Our analysis reveals conflicts across labor chains, distorted implementations of WCD, designers' sometimes limited political-economic understanding, and workers as active agents of change. These insights further inform a Diagnostic-Generative pathway that helps to address recurring risks, including labor conflicts and institutional reframing, while cultivating designers' policy and economic imagination. Following the design criticism tradition, and through a four-lens reflexive analysis, this study expands the action space for WCD and strengthens its relevance to real-world practice.