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

2026-02-13

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic reflexivity in current Worker-Centered Design (WCD) practices, which has left underlying tensions, blind spots, and structural contradictions insufficiently examined. Focusing on the food delivery industry, the research develops a fourfold reflexive analytical framework that integrates design critique with multi-labor system theory to uncover conflicts, practical distortions, and designers’ limited political-economic understanding within labor chains. Positioning workers as active agents of change, the work proposes a “diagnose–generate” pathway to expand WCD’s actionable scope and its policy-economic imagination. This approach offers concrete design interventions aimed at mitigating labor-capital conflicts and avoiding risks of institutional reconfiguration, thereby advancing and innovating design critique in the context of labor issues.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Jobs/Labor
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

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.

Problem

• Worker-Centered Design
• tensions
• blind spots
• Multi-Laborer System
• labor conflicts

Innovation

• Worker-Centered Design
• Multi-Laborer System
• Four-Lens Framework
• Diagnostic-Generative Pathway
• Design Criticism