Redefining Economic Value

Developing BE.conomy - This is an overview of the Design Research that lead to the Be.conomy concept before it became a product pitch.

Providing value through a barter exchange network that addresses the financial, safety and emotional needs of essential workers and the unemployed during the pandemic

 

Team

Michelle Ammirati
Erin Lee Carman

Methods
Desk Research
Mapping
Surveying
User Interviews
Expert Interviews
Cultural Probe
Concept Workshop

Role

Design Researcher
Strategist
Facilitator
Storyteller
Video Editor

Initial Challenge

How might we redefine economic value in the United States through alternative value systems?

Evolved Challenge

Create a platform for skills-exchange where people can pay for their essential and basic needs by exchanging a skill or a talent

  • Example: a musician could offer an hour long voice lesson in exchange for an hours worth of food shopping and delivery

Process

We used various research methods over the course of four months. I provide a brief overview of each of the methods below.

  • We conducted desk research on economics, value and case studies of alternative currency in local communities.

  • To understand the context of value in the United States, we mapped different values associated with American culture.

  • We also surveyed people about their personal values, relationship with success and what they value in relationships.

Alternative currency example

Alternative currency example

  • To understand how personal values differ across cultures, we interviewed people who have lived in the United States and another or multiple countries.

  • We also interviewed people with values-based products in their fields to understand real-time interactions with these types of products.

  • We wanted to understand the why behind social and spending behavior to see how money and values relate, so we also conducted a cultural probe through an online journaling tool.

Interview highlight

Interview highlight

Overall Insights

Interview synthesis board

Interview synthesis board

Across all our research methods, we uncovered three main insights:

  • Money is a means to an end, but financial needs must be met in order to find stability

  • Emotional needs like feeling safe in an environment, having the ability to express yourself, maintaining mental and physical wellness and connecting with others, must be met along with financial needs to achieve stability

  • Meeting emotional needs can manifest through rituals, a desire for change and a desire to share with and care for others

Reframing: During the COVID-19 Pandemic

To provide grounding to the more abstract concepts we were exploring, we framed our project in the context of the pandemic to better understand how what we were learning might be able to provide an impactful intervention.

We polled essential workers and unemployed people to learn about their experiences. From these polls we constructed personas for healthcare workers, teachers and performers (an example of someone who may be unemployed due to the pandemic).

We then created journey maps for these personas to better understand the stages of their days to learn where we may intervene.

We then developed three potential concepts to address the needs we identified with our personas with the context of our overall insights around money, physical and emotional well-being and the manifestation of emotional needs through rituals.

Initial discarded ideas included:

  • Co-op and live-in spaces for industry-specific fields like healthcare works

  • A hierarchy of needs ranking that determines a rating for need-based assistance implemented across congressional district

The concept we wanted to develop further was to create a platform for skills-exchange where people can pay for their essential and basic needs by exchanging a skill or a talent.

We chose this concept because we think it can provide basic living needs for people without financial support, create safer environments for essential workers, offer a sense of purpose and accomplishment to users who feel ‘lost’ emotionally during the pandemic, help build a support system, and produce an alternative economy for users that may withstand economic hardship.

Final Concept

This is the first iteration of a barter platform concept that we have continued to evolve over since December 2020. Watch our video that describes the first iteration barter concept, how we arrived at the concept through our semester-long research on alternative value systems and our strategy for moving forward.

Our next iteration, which we are currently evolving, is called BE.conomy and will facilitate barter exchanges between small businesses and people in varying degrees of career transition.