This post is part of the paper, ‘Friction-free cities and the rise of contactless and robotised delivery infrastructure’, published in City. Architect Sam Jacob (2015) claimed that ‘the city itself is a distributed robot’ where ‘we [might be] liberated to become friction-free smart citizens … doing our own thing’ (p. 25). In making a frictionless……
Category: Work
Robotised space and humans as subjects of care or sources of friction
This post is part of the PhD thesis ‘The Smart City in Motion’. NAVER 1784, described by Kyungmin at Baemin Robotics Lab as ‘the utopia for indoor delivery robots’ during the interview, demonstrates how humans and robots might co-exist in shared robotised space. NAVER 1784 is the second headquarters of the Korean tech giant Naver,……
The making of a Baemin courier
At 10 pm, I logged in as I was leaving home carrying a cubic thermal bag on my back as usual. My phone and GoPro were fully charged. The Baemin AI quickly found an order for me. I accepted it without even checking what it was because I must—I heard from my interviewees that rejecting……
A ceaselessly flowing city, tetheredly moving couriers: the case of Baemin delivery platform workers in Seoul
Re-posted from Backchannels, 4S blog: head here for the original post Digital platforms are increasingly taking over the operation of critical urban services (Barns 2019; Sadowski 2021). Notably, food delivery platforms, acclaimed as playing an infrastructural role during the COVID-19 pandemic by mediating delivery of food to immobilised populations, continue to proliferate in many cities across……