Designing for Instant Convenience: Dark Stores, Spatial Control and Worker Quantification in On-demand Delivery Platforms

This paper critically examines the design practices of platforms like DoorDash that promise to deliver convenience to consumers' doorsteps within minutes. Based on ethnographic observations in DoorDash dark stores and qualitative interviews with DoorDash workers, we find that instant delivery platforms have several work- and customer-specific impacts due to how platforms govern space and broader geographies. These platforms computationally remap city spaces to reorient and accelerate the flow of goods and people across them, subsequently exacerbating intra-urban disparities in access to food and groceries. Such centralized surveillance and management of space is made possible through hyper-quantified labor processes that severely limit worker agency inside dark stores and intensify working conditions. Furthermore, minute-tracking of worker output and mobilities, and their hyper-quantified evaluations eclipse much of the invisible work that sustains the veneer of instant deliveries. In arguing for a worker-centered design of gig platforms and their service delivery models, we end with three crucial dimensions that critical design researchers and platform designers need to account for when making things 'convenient.'