The restaurant industry has become increasingly reliant on digital technologies for business operations, digital marketing, and promotion, especially amid and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper presents the findings of a two-year study exploring how women- and minority-owned restaurants in Chicago and Detroit encountered and overcame digital challenges in their day-to-day operations, across a range of levels of digital skills and literacy. Drawing from semi-structured and impromptu interviews with restaurant owners (n= 47) and participant observation, we apply HCI literature on infrastructuring and patchworking to highlight how restaurateurs’ experiences often run counter to the assumptions of a "typical" user. Indeed, they often must build and leverage their—offline and online—networks of support to overcome failing infrastructures, both within the restaurant industry and on digital platforms. Concurrently, we emphasize the importance of community building and social infrastructuring to overcome these challenges while also building up alternative networks of resources for their communities, especially considering identity-related inequalities and amid a global moment of crisis.

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 workand 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.'

Peer Reviewed