AI technologies continue to advance from digital assistants to assisted decision-making. However, designing AI remains a challenge given its unknown outcomes and uses. One way to expand AI design is by centering stakeholders in the design process. We conduct co-design sessions with gig workers to explore the design of gig worker-centered tools as informed by their driving patterns, decisions, and personal contexts. Using workers’ own data as well as city-level data, we create probes—interactive data visuals—that participants explore to surface the well-being and positionalities that shape their work strategies. We describe participant insights and corresponding AI design considerations surfaced from data probes about: 1) workers’ well-being trade-offs and positionality constraints, 2) factors that impact well-being beyond those in the data probes, and 3) instances of unfair algorithmic management. We discuss the implications for designing data probes and using them to elevate worker-centered AI design as well as for worker advocacy.

Prior research has studied the detrimental impact of algorithmic management on gig workers and strategies that workers devise in response. However, little work has investigated alternative platform designs to promote worker well-being, particularly from workers’ own perspectives. We use a participatory design approach wherein workers explore their algorithmic imaginaries to co-design interventions that center their lived experiences, preferences, and well-being in algorithmic management. Our interview and participatory design sessions highlight how various design dimensions of algorithmic management, including information asymmetries and unfair, manipulative incentives, hurt worker well-being. Workers generate designs to address these issues while considering competing interests of the platforms, customers, and themselves, such as information translucency, incentives co-configured by workers and platforms, worker-centered data-driven insights for well-being, and collective driver data sharing. Our work offers a case study that responds to a call for designing worker-centered digital work and contributes to emerging literature on algorithmic work.