Physical money is disappearing and we are moving towards a cashless society where hard cash only exists to avoid taxes or to buy illegal services and goods. A suitcase of money even had a magic cinematic effect making people do or believe in almost anything. Very human interactions, gestures and rituals got totally lost or neglected through the introduction of e-money. I will miss playfully flipping coins or whishing for luck throwing them in a spring.

In third world countries ATM cash-machines are rarely available and people usually do not have bank-accounts. With mobile phone becoming ubiquitous, they are becoming more and more the wallet, however without any designed experience. Paying with Credit Cards or RFID cards is a very engineered and raw-data driven transaction, the experience and the process of buying a coffee or a car is basically the same.

I realized that the bus-driver does not care if i pay with a card or a wire, the actual transaction is just reduced to this beep - as long as it beeps it is okay. It is possible to ride on the London busses recording the oyster-beep on a recordable greeting-card and play it when you touch-in.

Inspired by those observation I designed devices for different spending behaviors, imagining new parasitical services sitting on top of bank accounts that create feedback mechanisms and a new relationship to our bank-account as an extension of ourselves. I am interested in exploring how even simple designed behaviors embedded in digital transactions can change our behavior, create meaning, new reflexes, rituals or pleasures interacting with e-money.

money is time
Once transactions are happening digital, the actual currency is becoming less important and can be converted to other and more personal values. How much is the experience I am purchasing worth compared to my personal labortime?





Environmental & Ethical
Dataming allows us to create an extra layer of information and create services to detect ethical or environmental footprints. How would our behavior change if we could create feedbackmechanism for shopping local? Would a carbon credit system make us more considerate paying at the petrolstation?

Control
How much money we have in Bankaccounts or how we spend money is still considered very personal information. In the last five years we opened more and more about our identities on social networks. Would we use networked accounts for new social interactions - maybe control mechanisms within relationships or showing off and benchmarking in our social network?