The third week is about detailing the future scenarios and problem definition. In translating last week’s Chinese interview I summarised some of the problems stated by Chinese delivery drivers:

1. Because car accidents happen a lot caused by delivery workers rushing to deliver food, their transport space, and vehicle could be improved to ensure safety 

2. The platform’s incentive mechanism made the working hours longer. Therefore, the wages should be increased directly, and the working hours should be reduced to bring enough time to rest 

3. The food delivery industry gives more employment opportunities to people with low education, it’s one of the best jobs for them to get to the big cities, which also increases social stability at the same time.

4. Algorithms help delivery workers to take more orders within a certain range, and there are stations for them to take a rest and meetings for them to exchange information in time. 

5. Delivery workers rely on youthfulness and physical strength, and these advantages diminish with age, so we need to have a national policy to protect their lives, especially after retirement, at the same time, we need to give them the most respect 

6. In China there are now many delivery workers who are deaf and mute, which gives them more employment opportunities, but at the same time the platforms don’t give them enough protection because they take more risks in the delivery process and have communication barriers with customers

We’re continuing to use the carrier bag as a symbol, and working on the details we want to know next. There are a lot of delivery robots in use today, but there’s been a lot of bad press about them getting lost and spontaneously combusting, so our vision of the future has gone from utopian to more dystopian because there might be a lot of difficulties we had to face. Technology doesn’t work and people lose jobs and the government needs to act, so delivery might become governmental (essential workers and protected like care workers are).

If delivery workers become civil servants, will the system by which we get our food also change? There are already a lot of restaurants in China where you can only get pre-prepared food, they were made in the factories and transported to restaurants. These dishes are very unsatisfactory in terms of taste and nutrition, people are spending a lot of money on not being able to access fresh food, which is not something that people will want to experience in the future. We hope everyone has access to food like we have to air, and people can gather together in food centres to enjoy the variety of things to eat.

Key points from the tutorial:

• snatch
• food
• carrier
• technology

The future workplace: future London, a mega globalised city, everyone has access to their cultural food

At this stage our ideas are very diffuse, we are putting all the ideas that keep popping up into our “container” but we haven’t organised them yet. For next week’s incubator, I tried to create posters advertising civil servant jobs.