approach
In May 2020 three independent teams of researchers will convene in a virtual residency at Trust to develop speculative strategies for mitigating labour issues in the trucking industry.
Background
Historically, trucking and logistics infrastructures have been able to leverage their critical positions within society to strike, stopping logistical flows to other industries. This increased lever for strike power in combination with being at the forefront of human labour automation makes it a key case study for understanding the impact of automation and potential strategies mitigating its effects on labour.
Currently, the trucking industry is in the midst of three societal transformations: platformisation, automation and decarbonisation. This will have profound consequences for one of the largest workforces in the world: truckers.
Automation
Automation aims to remove truckers from logistics altogether. Different stages of automation have unique implications on labour that need to be analysed individually. This could lead to disastrous effects for truckers and impact the communities and businesses which depend on them.
Platformization
New business models replace existing transportation companies with competitive, software-first digitally mediated marketplaces (see Uber Freight). Without support, this could devastate truckers’ livelihoods, similar to the impact Uber has had on the taxi industry and the amount drivers are paid.
Decarbonisation
Climate change drives regulation and public sentiment towards electrification. This legitimises automation due to increased energy efficiency from platooning and the replacement of current diesel trucking fleets. Arguments for decarbonisation will be used to radically shift the current ownership models, often away from trucker ownership to centralised logistics companies.
Projects
Research on these societal transformations is done through a virtual residency and three projects. The six researchers — with backgrounds in architecture, economics & software design research — experiment with and produce a variety of strategic outputs.
The 3 accepted projects and teams are listed below.
Safe Harbour
by Heat Island (Christopher Burman & Luke Jones)
Safe Harbour is a project that seeks to address the question of what the structure and mechanisms of new communal infrastructures and services might be. How do logistics workers create space for mutual support, recognition and critical participation at the interface between planetary scale platforms?
Can truckers become custodians overseeing material and resource flows, rather than discrete, blank units. Will automation change the unit sizes of delivery? What are the systems that would be needed to leverage the knowledge and expertise of truckers and logistics professionals inside a rapidly automating industry if we focused on long-term, permanent and socially desirable outcomes.
Heat Island is a new design studio working across architecture, urbanism, software and environmental engineering.
Christopher Burman is an urban technologist and artist. He studied Architecture at The Bartlett, UCL and participated in The New Normal post-graduate research programme at the Strelka Institute Moscow.
Luke Jones is an architect, lecturer and writer. He is the author, with Anna Mill, of Square Eyes (2018). He leads the Foundation Architecture studio at the Cass School of Architecture, London. His architectural work explores the potential of self-building and experimental materials. He is also the co-host of a podcast About Buildings + Cities, exploring architectural history, theory, process and ideas from the distant past to the present day.
Efficiency Logics for Mobile Platform Logistics
by Shadow Price (Stephanie Sherman + Jeremiah Dittmar)
Shadow Price propose to develop an efficiency framework that can be used to identify leverage points and design strategic transitions across trucking logistic systems. This framework will be used to design targeted propositions that support workers in the transition to autonomous and semi-autonomous mobile platform logistics.
Shadow Price researches value externalities in socio-technical ecosystems, investigating the impacts of emerging technologies to propose more viable planetary equations and configurations.
Stephanie Sherman develops systems, stories, and strategies through design, art, culture and technology. She is currently a Phd Candidate in Design at the University of California San Diego, advised by Benjamin Bratton and Mariana Wardwell. She holds an MA in Philosophy from Duke University and a BA in Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She has founded and directed organizations including Elsewhere Museum, Kulturpark, Provisions Research and Design Forward. She currently works as a strategist with the Center for Design and Geopolitics, The UCSD Design Lab, and Supervisions Studio, and produces long-form interventionist audio stories with Radioee.net.
Dr. Jeremiah Dittmar is Assistant Professor of Economics at the LSE Department of Economics. His research interests are Economic Growth, Economic History, Macroeconomics and Applied Econometrics.
Organizational Architectures and Distributed Mechanisms for Coordination at Scale in the Trucking Sector
by Beth McCarthy & Daniel Shavit
Traditionally unions and cooperatives have served to insulate smaller players from the extractive and exploitative bargaining power of larger entities. However, union busting actions and declining membership has decreased the power of individual truckers vis a vis transnational corporate behemoths and trucking companies.
We assess that any entities capable of mustering the joint forces of truckers must mirror those of the emergence of the platform economy, such as minimal frictions, automated fulfilling of needs and coordination at scale.
Through this lens, we will through our research look at what a distributed, censorship resistant and privacy preserving union implementation can look like at a high level.
Beth McCarthy is the co-founder of Starfish Labs, an interdisciplinary innovation lab supporting research, design & development of projects and initiatives across the global Starfish ecosystem. Beth's approach to human-centered mechanism/incentive design drawing on legal education at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and training at the Legal Design Lab at Stanford d.School, combined with experience developing computational behavioral systems at Stanford School of Medicine's Wall Lab, Nightingale (YC S14) and as an applied behavior analyst.
Daniel Shavit is a governance researcher focused on the topics of protocolar governance, taxonomic classification and experimentation of DAOs, as well as open-science with the Abstract Machine project for Pando (immutable, uncensorable and self-governed journals) . Daniel has a degree in economics from Bocconi University with a thesis on the perverse monetary, economic and political effects of natural resource booms. In a previous life he worked as a payments consultant advising entities such as Atos Worldline, Paypal, Mastercard, Unicredit and the Italian Banking Association on clearing and settlement and dispute systems.