Monies, economies and democracy: cultivating ambivalence in the co-design of digital currencies

ABSTRACT

Systematised collaborative design of complementary currencies is still a largely unexplored area that offers underutilised opportunities for supporting a fair and sustainable sharing economy. Future currency design necessitates attention to the systemic factors and the social particularities in which new monetary alternatives, i.e. ‘monies’, and the technological solutions that serve these alternatives, are created. This paper argues for a socially and contextually sensitive design of complementary currency innovation. It considers the technological conditions and the tendencies to exploitation from contemporary capitalism. Based on the literature review, we propose collaborative design of complementary currencies with particularist and inclusive approaches. New directions for open-ended economic innovation are explored in finding opportunities in the future-oriented Transition Design, supported by an empathic and ambivalent design mindset.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambivalence
• collaborative design
• community currencies
• empathy
• inclusion
• transformation design 

Acknowledgements

We thank Aalto University for granting seed funding (Fall 2017) for ‘Radical Sustainable Innovations - Aalto Observatory on Digital Valuation Systems’, which enabled us to develop a framework for the design of new digital currencies and to write this journal article. We also want to thank Professor Pekka Nikander for leading the Aalto Observatory initiative which opened new collaboration between Aalto schools and Finnish and international partners.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.