Beyond Riding: Passenger Engagement with Driver Labor through Gamified Interactions

2025-12-12

AI Summary

Ride-hailing platforms externalize labor risks onto drivers, while passengers remain largely unaware of drivers’ working conditions—undermining labor rights protection. Method: Through participatory design, we conducted nine scenario-based workshops involving 19 drivers and 15 passengers, pioneering the integration of gamified mechanisms into in-vehicle interfaces to create immersive, safety-oriented passenger–driver empathy experiences. Contribution: We identify key passenger cognitive blind spots and map pathways for shifts in perceived power dynamics; distill drivers’ core occupational诉求 (e.g., fair algorithmic treatment, autonomy, dignity); propose a novel “consumer-driven labor advocacy” paradigm; and produce a human-centered design guideline for algorithmic management systems—offering a practical, interaction-design framework to advance responsible consumption and labor solidarity in platform economies.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Jobs/Labor
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

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.

Problem

• Addresses passenger unawareness of driver labor conditions in ridesharing
• Explores gamified interactions to foster passenger solidarity with drivers
• Designs guidelines for human-centered technology in algorithmically-managed work

Innovation

• Gamified in-ride interactions engage passengers with driver experiences
• Workshops reveal passenger knowledge gaps and shift consumption behaviors
• Design guidelines for human-centered tech to foster driver solidarity