FlipGig was a research project that brought together user research, transport research and operational research to consider how gig economy models in last-mile logistics can be made more fair and sustainable.
The project ran for a little around 3 years. My role focused on:
- Managing the research design, research ethics, recruitment, communications and user research team
- Managing industry partnerships with Hermes (Evri), Transport for London, Miralis Data, CitySprint, and Menzies Distribution
- Driving worker-led approaches - Co-design of research protocol with workers
- Working with couriers to understand their lived and working experiences to inform service and platform design
- Research delivery: reports, papers, stakeholder presentations
- Web and content design for project website
- Line management of user researchers
What I did
- Data Engineering - designing and developing data standards, databases and pipelines to ingest, clean and serve last mile logistics data
- User Research - ethnographic research with couriers and stakeholders
- Workshop Design
- Service design
- Data Visualisation
- Real World Trials
Outcomes:
- Recommendations for last-mile and gig economy courier platform and services to focus on aspects of worker experiences
- Contributions to Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on The impact of Coronavirus on businesses and workers.
- New methods for worker-led data collection, prioritising exploring their lived experiences, and exploring data they may already gather.
- Engagement with industry over fair pay and conditions
- Feature article in WIRED
- Co-organisation of Digital Worker Enquiry bringing together researchers, tech and workers.