MACRO UX — IBM BRIEF 2
Feb. 10–17 | Bala, Desire, Mu, Dora, Sofia
My personal research focused on projects that where dealing with transactions or currencies. First, I needed to determine the difference between transaction and interaction (Graph 1). There is a genre called “Transactional Arts” that focuses on art projects where some sort of value is explicitly exchanged and below you’ll fine some examples.
“The green stripes each represent one dollar coming in and the red stripes each represent a dollar that I spent. The panels that are all green show the income that starts each set of drawings.
In 1924 Marcel Duchamp issued 30 “Monte Carlo Bonds” over 500 Francs each , and apparently raised funds from his friends in order to play Roulette promising 20% p.a. interest redeemable in three years. The bonds are seen as works of conceptual art that mockingly took advantage of both finance and gambling.
The dutch artist group Atelier van Lieshout designed their own currency called AvL, which is convertible at an exchange rate of 1:1 into beer.
Based on my research I thought of a market with its main goal being to exchange “junk”. By junk I mean things that people would otherwise throw away but instead of creating more waste they could exchange them for something else. This market would have its own currency and everything would cost the same, no matter how expensive it was to acquire and that is because the object has no value for the person anymore. Desire had an idea based on banks’ system shifting from physical to digital and how that affects the elderly.
On our first meeting with IBM we presented the wellness integration idea from last week, the market idea and Desire’s idea. The wellness app was received positively and after we shared our concerns about not being able to execute it, Scott said that we only had to create a detailed case study and a well designed prototype and plan of how this app would work. This freed us in a way because a lot of the obstacles we faced were knowlegde and skills based. Charlie seemed to like the market idea and he talked about the Brixton Pound. Basically, a community currency for residents to use in local shops in order to keep the local market alive and running. In his feedback Al talked about reverse innovation. Most people look at this brief and think of high tech ways to go about it but I wanted to explore it in a more physical way. Some criticism was received by IBM and John & Al regarding the bank idea for focusing on the elderly and instead they proposed that we could focus on a larger group that for whatever reason faces the same difficulties in using digital services.
Because we were asked to present actual prototypes on Thursday and our ideas were still in a very primal stage we decided to shift to food waste and create an app through which a person would be able to track all the fresh produce that was about to go bad in their fridge and suggest ways of avoiding that, either by recommending recipes or by showing nearby food donation centres. The user could also scan their Tesco clubcard, if they owned one, and the information of what they bought would immediately be transfered in the app. Below are some screens that me and Bala designed and you can find the Figma file here.
References:
Coombs, G., Mcnamara, A. and Sade, G. (2019). Undesign : critical practices at the intersection of art and design. London ; New York: Roudledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Dodd, N. (2016). The social life of money. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Plewe, D.A. (2008). Transactional Arts — Interaction as Transaction. [online] Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275039867_Transactional_Arts_-_Interaction_as_Transaction.
www.christies.com. (2015). Marcel Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond (№30) | Christie’s. [online] Available at: https://www.christies.com/features/Marcel-Duchamps-Monte-Carlo-Bond-6668-1.aspx [Accessed 20 Apr. 2022].
www.nfgaleria.com. (n.d.). Danica Phelps. Income’s Outcome | NF Galería. [online] Available at: https://www.nfgaleria.com/en/exhibition/danica-phelps-incomes-outcome [Accessed 23 Apr. 2022].
