Domestic-helpers’ Co-operatives : A Speculative Probe
Team Phoenix [ Sweta Bisht, Jahnvi Vegad]
Brief
Brief for this studio is to probe into service systems and socio-technical infrastructures in gated-communities and their management systems. This also considers the society management apps like WhatsApp, MyGate, ApartmentADDA etc. The short-term goal of this article is to provide a design research proposal in this context.
Exploratory Research
The Status Quo of Gated Communities
Starting with looking at various academia on the given abstract — “Gated Societies”, we got understanding about various aspects of gated-societies and their implications. Some of the paper/articles talked about Society Management Apps that are “trending” in the market nowadays — MyGate, ApartmentADDA, ApnaComplex etc to name a few. Some talked about management through existing mediums like WhatsApp. The most common points we found out from our literature reviews were,
- “Over-protective” and “conservative” mentality of residents regarding leaving their belongings inside the house in a gated-society.
- Petty, edgy nature of people coming out from using society-management apps.
- Similar expressions for quantifications of objects, services and human beings.
- Implications of rating systems on livelihoods of domestic-helpers and their vulnerable states due to frequently getting 1–2 stars.
- The dichotomy of integration and segregation due to “gated” societies, a false sense of “group” that prevails in such societies. Also, the condition of workers is in better condition than those on outside.
- False notions of security along with various parameters to measure security in gated-societies.
The questionable professional place of domestic-helpers on household level as well as their role in the ecosystem of gated-communities got us curious!
According to an article, some of these apps have maid-rating/reviewing features on them. Interestingly, these ratings/reviews are validated & modifiable by society secretaries and these ratings sometimes cost the domestic-helpers their jobs too. It is interesting how such Apps can give such hidden forms of power into some people’s hands so easily. Domestic-helpers are concerned about their ratings on such mediums in an obvious way, but at the same time they don’t really care about ratings as people do that anyway.
According to this paper, a “home” is never considered as a “workplace” and thus the domestic-helpers are never considered as “professionals”. Their work is more shown as “humanitarian” rather than organised by law. Thus, these domestic helpers are never given respect and mostly are underpaid or ill-treated.
Both these papers and more got us thinking about asymmetrical relationships between domestic-helpers and their employers in such systems. This somewhere led us to the process of narrowing down our research area. We wanted to probe into these equations that are often imbalanced to understand them better. For which, we decided to go with two case studies of society management systems.
Case Studies
WhatsApp | MyGate App
To understand better how the systems are working in such societies, we decided to go for two case studies:
- Analysing society WhatsApp group chats
This analysis of a WhatsApp group chat is done over the chats from past four years(2016–2019). This analysis gave us an idea of how the overall management of a society is done on a chatting platform.
We saw how important decisions regarding domestic-help like their salaries, amount of work, leaves etc were discussed on this chat.
This chart shows how management platforms, give some forms of power to the actors involved. We made a chart of visible, invisible and hidden power given by these platforms to actors over other actors.
For example, Apps give residents a visible power over domestic-helpers by providing features like rating / reviewing / disengaging them, invisible power of surveillance to the authoritarian people over domestic-helpers and other residents by including entry/exit logs features etc. Later, we also took a step back to reflect upon what aspects of power flow in such a system.
2. Actors’ map for MyGate — Gated community management app
This Actors’ map shows the data flow among actors of the MyGate app. This data is of qualitative and quantitative type. The information for mapping data flow is taken from MyGate official website.
Interesting results from this map are, the data flow of both kinds ‘towards’ domestic workers is more than the data flow ‘from’ them to other actors.
Also, security guards are at the centre of this map, as such apps have huge tasks to handle on guards’ part. However, except for logging in and logging out into the property, the domestic-helpers don’t get much to participate in such apps, whereas the features like rating the maids and cooks — are available for residents.
Our Research Area
Speculative Probing | Domestic-helpers’ Co-operatives
Our initial research raised a clear question of ‘Imbalanced equations between domestic-helpers and their employers i.e. residents’.
To give an example, when apps like MyGate claim that “Now it is easy ‘to disengage with’(to fire) your domestic-help in one-click only; unlike without the app, where the method of disengaging was very cumbersome!”.
Here, somewhere the domestic-helpers don’t get to say anything regarding important decisions of their jobs. The reviews, ratings etc everything is being used to constantly judge them and many of them are not even aware about it.
This creates an opportunity for emergent interventions like co-ops centred around domestic-helpers, providing community benefits -socially and economically. For example, the rising community of Up&Go.
“Taking a speculative approach, what are the outcomes when a co-op of domestic-helpers emerges in a gated-society?”
Our idea is not how might we but, is a probe into what if?
Our Research Plan
Methodology | Outcome | Timeline
We’re planning to understand this emergent situation with help of an intermediate design artefact to conduct Research through Design.
Through our research, we plan to deliver specific design tools like system blueprints, customer journey maps etc. as outputs.
The outcome of this research will shed light on a speculative situation where a shift might be seen in equations between domestic-helpers and their employers.
