Why Blockchain?

Based on my research of emerging technology and disruptive innovation I chose to focus my research around blockchain technology. I did this for a number of reasons. First was the fact that blockchain has the power to be truly disruptive, even more than it already is (Karp, 2015). Second, blockchain is less likely than other technologies like drones, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to be the byproduct of marketing hype. Blockchain is dense, and it isn’t sexy in the way that some of the other technologies might be. My suspicion going into this research was that this could be do to a lack of design support in the field. Third, blockchain’s initial applications are incredibly broad and stand to touch nearly every industry and have an effect on all our digital experiences. In fact, some propose that digital experiences that will one day be on blockchain is nearly limitless (Buntinx, 2015). Understanding blockchain, the way it works, its implications, its obstacles, and its potential is a career path on its own and cannot be fully understood in a the context of a thesis. Nonetheless, my industry intervention for this research was to use my design tools and design thinking frameworks to understand blockchain and then help others understand, and hopefully use it. 

“If you’re not up to speed on blockchain, you need to be. The technology is young and changing very rapidly; widespread commercialization is still a few years off. Nonetheless, to avoid disruptive surprises or missed opportunities, strategists, planners, and decision makers across industries and business functions should pay heed now and begin to investigate applications of the technology (Schatsky, 2016).”

Limitation

The process I used to decide on blockchain technology involved three steps. Gathering technologies, mapping them, and vetting one. In reflection on my process, conducting these exercises in the absence of a company’s participation was an unfortunate practicality. In an ideal situation a designer would already be involved with a company and understand its business and industry. That knowledge would be very relevant in the evaluating of which technology to pursue. In my situation however, due to time constraints, I did not have the luxury of waiting until I had successfully partnered with a business to begin my technology selection process. In light of this I decided to add “broad business potential” to my decision making criteria in an effort to mitigate the risk of choosing a technology that might only be applied in a narrow set of situations and thus limit my options for industry participants. 

Deeper Into The Blockchain

So, what is blockchain? Imagine you owe your neighbor $10. You happen to have a $10 bill on hand and decide to walk next door to your neighbor’s house and hand them the cash. You tell them that you are paying them back for for the $10 they loaned you to pay for parking at an event you both attended earlier that week. Your neighbor accepts the money and the transaction is complete.  In this scenario, you don’t need any third party to help you make this transaction. You simply give them the cash. Could you imagine if you needed to call up another person who ran a business of mediating person-to-person cash transactions? Could you imagine needing to hand them the money for them to then hand it to your neighbor, all the while recording the time, amount, and other details of the transaction in a ledger, and you had to pay them a small fee? Well, when you pay with a credit card, paypal, Venmo, Square or any other service, this (or some variation of it) is what is happening. And the more players involved, the higher the cost of the transaction. One of the first practical problems blockchain solved was this one. You may be familiar with Bitcoin which is one application of blockchain. Similar in the way that email is one application of the internet. Bitcoin allows you to trade a piece of value digitally the same way you trade cash physically. No middle men, no disputes over the events. The question you might have now is, “who owns the blockchain?” or “who runs bitcoin?”. The answer is no one and everyone. Using cleverly written code which was uploaded to the internet by a mysterious programmer known only by his pseudonym (Satoshi Nakamoto), blockchain is able to function without a central authority, making it truly decentralized (Nakamoto, 2008) . Again, this is similar to the way that no one owns the internet. This is a very simplified illustration of the technology that doesn’t address various other components of blockchain such as anonymity, mining, private blockchains, colored coins, and smart contracts among other things.

BBC on Bitcoin & the Blockchain (BBC, 2015)

Blockchain: A Human-Centered Perspective

As fascinating and complex as blockchain is, it essentially solves one very fundamental problem: the problem of trust (The Economist, 2015). Trust governs all of our interactions and the lack of trust online has prevented and undermined countless innovations since the creation of the internet (Chang et al., 2013). In an article examining the role tust plays in internet banking and ecommerce, the authors note that even with special attention being made to build websites that appear trustworthy "consumers might refrain from visiting web sites designed for e‐commerce or internet banking because they do not consider the internet infrastructure as reliable and secure (Grabner‐Kräuter and Faullant, 2008)." This fact gets to the root of the problem. It doesn't matter how trustworthy a company or person is on the internet, the internet itself cannot be trusted. 

"We can establish trust among a small group of people known to us, but it’s harder to achieve trusting relationships on a larger scale (Cerf, 2010)."

The blockchain can only be truly decentralized if all the parties share equal amounts of trust with each other, or in this case, share no trust with each other and instead trust the system. This is made possible by the use of radical transparency in the form of a universally shared ledger (Davies, 2015). Every participant has an identical digital record of every single event that has ever happened on the blockchain. The logic of this is similar to the push for body cameras on police officers and the reason why depositions are recorded. With a complete record of an event, there can be no dispute, the facts are the facts. However, until now, it just hasn’t been practical for everyone to have an always up-to-date record of every event on a global system. That is what the blockchain code solves (Schatsky and Muraskin, 2016). Complete transparency allows for complete trust which makes true decentralization possible. And once decentralization is achieved a number of efficiencies and opportunities arise such as transaction costs going down as users can begin to transact directly with each other.

"In computer systems, trust is something that must be maintained. Computers are born trustworthy but can become less so as they’re modified by software (Grier, 2015)."

Another important aspect of blockchain is the fact that it is digital. This my seem obvious but the reality is that blockchain can be used to keep a record of transactions of nearly anything. Music, diamonds, hotel points, votes, and anything else you can think of. Blockchain effectively strips away one of the last remaining barriers between the physical and digital world. Physical products can be represented on the blockchain and tracked and digital products can now retain an element of scarcity, fortifying their value (Graillot, 2015). The implications are endless.

Blockchain Uses (Robinson and Leising, 2015)

MIT Prototype Jam

In an effort to understand blockchain more fully, I participated in a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that took the form a month long hackathon. The team that I collaborated with for this program worked on a blockchain application for the hotel industry. The idea, which was created by the team leader, Natasha, was to use blockchain to allow users to book hotel rooms directly with hotel chains using Bitcoin, Ether (another cryptocurrency), or a linked bank account. Additionally, the booking platform would also allow users to book with hotel points, purchase various types of points, and also pay with combinations of fiat currency, cryptocurrency and branded currency. My role in this project was to develop the user experience and user interface of the platform as well as to design the presentation for the pitch.

Hotel Blockchain Presentation

Demo of Working Hotel Blockchain Protoype

Mapping

A vital skill for experience designers is the ability to create a range of different maps. These might be mind maps, stakeholder maps, story maps, impact maps, etc. Designers have been traditionally effective at communicating visually, and studies show that using visual and spatial tools can be valuable when working through complex systems or ideas (ThinkBuzan, 2013). In this case,maps are particularly relevant as Blockchain has the potential to unlock a number of efficiencies in our traditional, overly complex systems.

Mind Maps

Datami Value Map

Immersion Experience 

Mapping, desk research, interviews and other forms of design research are valuable, but in my opinion, nothing compares with actually experiencing a given role or situation. Being able to work at DataMi full-time in addition to my research activities was both challenging and valuable. Challenging due to the fact that it put a strain on my resources of time and energy but I would never have been able to come to understand advertising technology and telecommunications at the level I currently do, in this short amount of time, any other way. For me, this highlights something specific about blockchain and other technologies like it. Unlike drones or virtual reality, blockchain’s various applications largely lie further up the development pipeline. This requires designers who are interested in applying this new technology or forecasting its effects to understand how things work and why the things that we take for granted, work the way they do.

While working as a designer for Datami, my work can be divided into 3 parts: designing a product, designing a website, and designing marketing material. There was immense research value in working on the marketing materials and website as they forced me to understand, internalize, and then communicate Datami’s business value. Working on the product, which was a consumer facing app to be released in emerging markets helped me to understand how mobile advertising tech and telecom worked in practice rather than just in theory.

Datami Website

The website was developed in collaboration with another DXD Crew 1 member, Emma Crowe, who also worked at Datami during my time with them. Additionally, we commissioned a number of illustrations from another Hyper Island alumni, Zeb (last name) to accomplish the the desired aesthetic. While building the website was great design practice in its own right, it forced me to come to understand Datami’s business value.

Datami App

In addition to creating the website for Datami, I lead the design for a new product for the company. Working on the app raised a number of valuable and relevant questions that would impact my future activities and thoughts. These questions included,  “why do competitor apps use branded currency instead of directly converting to data?”, “why are top-up amounts only offered in certain denominations?”, “how do users know that data has been added to their account?”, “what is the difference between an ad coming from an ad exchange versus our portal?”, “what types of user behavior are we able to track within our app and in apps we redirect to?”. Due to the fact that I was also conducting a number of Blockchain based research activities in parallel, I was able to recognize a number of pain points and opportunities that seemed potentially solvable by blockchain while I worked. I kept a running list of these small insights and ideas