San Jose State University
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This paper shares the experiences of two teams of design professionals working on parallel grassroots social impact design projects to address poverty and financial precarity in Silicon Valley and London. This paper explores challenges facing these teams as they channel a sense of moral outrage into the research and development of alternitives to high-risk financial services like payday loans. It charts the open, inclusive design process of these teams as they engage community partners and recognize the financial expertise of people getting by on tight incomes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how working slowly and openly through transdisciplinary communities of practice—like the two groups described here, or EPIC itself—can help keep alive conversations around power and activism in the practice of design and ethnographic research. These conversations are essential if social impact design is to reach its transformative potential while avoiding many of the pitfalls that have led to the failure of well-intentioned poverty alleviation initiatives in the past.
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INTRODUCTION
Fuck you. We’re taking you down. They’re going out of business by next year. That’s my goal. Let’s get rid of these people. They’re parasites. They’re the worst.
That is Nick Durant,1 co-founder of the design consultancy Plot London, uncharacteristically “riled up” about predatory payday lenders targeting low-income communities in his neighborhood of Tower Hamlets, London (Shelly 2016). He and Plot London co-founder Gill Wildman are confident that their small grassroots2 team of design professionals can help alleviate local poverty by developing compelling, ethical alternatives to predatory financial services. But how does a team like this—unmoored from the institutional constraints and supports of a traditional design project—decide how to ‘do good’ as citizens and activists? More broadly, what lessons can grassroots efforts offer other designers and ethnographic researchers attempting to affect positive social change?
Here, I share the stories of two parallel, self-directed teams consisting of design professionals and anthropologists: FAIR Money in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Plot London in the United Kingdom. These groups are working to develop alternative financial services grounded in the experiences of people who normally must rely on risky sources of credit like payday loans to make ends meet. FAIR Money and Plot London face many ethical and practical challenges as they venture outside of their accustomed corporate and academic contexts, partner with local advocacy groups, and attempt to address the financial precarity in their neighborhoods. Although initiated independently of one another, both teams share the goal of using hybrid approaches that leverage ethnographic research and service design to help people affected by financial exclusion.
I initially joined the FAIR Money collective when I was two years out of design school, optimistic that I could translate my design skills into creating locally-relevant, sustainable, innovative approaches to the intractable problems of poverty and inequality. When I decided to get my master’s in applied anthropology, my optimism was tempered by a head full of articles critical of social impact design failures and poverty alleviation projects that ended up harming communities they sought to help. For my thesis, I wanted to identify ways these negative outcomes could be averted. I decided to research FAIR Money as part of an effort to think with fellow designers and ethnographers as they navigate the difficult process of designing for social impact. During this research, I had the good fortune to meet Katie Shelly through the Ethnography Hangout online community. Shelly was a fellow student in the United Kingdom (she has since graduated) who recorded a podcast documenting Plot London’s quest to develop alternative financial services. Eventually, Plot came to build on the work of FAIR Money, and the Plot team’s experiences became an important comparative case for my research on FAIR Money.
The stories of these two teams contribute to a broader discussion of the complicated ethical considerations surrounding impact design projects that work with marginalized groups, as well as the challenges and opportunities in grassroots collaborations. I begin this paper by providing some context for these projects in the history and discourse of both social impact design and applied anthropology. I go on to describe how FAIR Money and Plot London channeled their sense of outrage into research and action, and the insights contained in their experiences. I conclude with a discussion of how working slowly and openly through transdisciplinary communities of practice can help keep conversations of power and activism alive in the practice of design and ethnographic research.
THE CONTEXT FOR ACTION
A Brief History of Social Impact Design
Under a variety of labels—humanitarian design, design for the majority, or social impact design—designers have long exhorted one another to set aside the production of consumer products for a relatively wealthy minority, and to instead refocus their attention, aided by ethnographic methods, on the many “wicked problems” facing marginalized groups ignored or underserved by the market (Papaneck 1984; Schwittay 2014; Thorpe and Gamman 2011). As design professionals increasingly apply their research and iterative problem-solving approaches to humanitarian challenges, however, they have been criticized, by anthropologists and designers alike, for repeating problematic practices of mid-twentieth-century poverty alleviation and international development projects. Anthropologists have long and loudly critiqued these projects for being top-down or neo-colonialist in nature, with a litany of deleterious effects on the very marginalized communities they sought to improve (Scott 1999). These critiques draw attention to the ways in which development discourses tend to legitimize experts’ modernist and technical ways of knowing, often to the exclusion of indigenous knowledge and consideration of community-led political action. The contributions of anthropologists themselves to development projects have also drawn criticism, sparking conversations about when, how, and if anthropologists should directly engage to support the marginalized or impoverished communities with whom they often work (Nagengast and Vélez-Ibáñez 2004, 1). Despite (presumably) good intentions, humanitarian designers and anthropologists have thus been labeled imperialist for attempting to reshape impoverished communities according to Western conceptions of modernity and for aligning themselves with the interests of local elites (Tunstall 2013).
A recent surge of interest in design thinking for development within civil society organizations, design consultancies, corporations, and governments has reignited these debates (Tunstall 2013). Compounding these issues, designers and anthropologists in commercial design practice are drawn into a depoliticized discourse centered on user experience. Referring to someone as ‘the user’ can prune away uncomfortable considerations of power, class, gender, and ethnicity, ignoring the complex “bodies” of actual people who cannot be reduced to one-dimensional subjects. In his 2016 EPIC paper The Rise of the User and the Fall of People: Ethnographic Cooptation and a New Language of Globalization, Shaheen Amirebrahimi (2016) explains how rich ethnographic insights often become pared down to only those details directly relevant to a particular user’s interaction with a product or service. In this way, the language of the user hides the fact that all design, regardless of being explicitly labeled as ‘social impact design,’ has the potential for broad social impacts. Humanitarian praxis brings into high relief the ethical quandaries and politics of commercial product design, as well as the social distance between decision-maker and the persons affected by the decision. Social impact design for financial inclusion compounds the dehumanizing abstraction of ‘the user’ with a similarly loaded term: ‘the poor.’
Financial Inclusion
The FAIR Money and Plot London collaborations fall loosely under the umbrella of a growing financial inclusion movement, where many of these issues come to a head. Financial inclusion aims to bring affordable financial services to low-income and rural communities that have traditionally lacked access to them (Schwittay 2011). Financial inclusion initiatives include: micro-loans to help set up small businesses, community savings groups that help families weather times of hardship, money transfer services that can quickly and securely move remittances around the globe, and the financial literacy needed to make use of these services. Proponents of financial inclusion insist that these services are necessary for people globally to build economic resilience and lift themselves out of poverty. A broad spectrum of technology companies, banks, governmental agencies, universities, and philanthropic organizations invest in and research financial inclusion. The financial inclusion movement began in international development spheres with microfinance institutions like the Grameen Bank. Financial inclusion proponents remain focused on providing accessible sources of credit, but have recently branched into other banking services, such as money transfers and savings accounts, often enabled by the global proliferation of mobile phone technology. Financial service providers are also growing more interested in creating services for low-income communities in the West, including centers of financial innovation like San Francisco and London at the heart of this paper. Financial inclusion is driven by established financial service providers like Mastercard, and by financial technology (fintech) startups looking to outmaneuver the old guard by creating new financial infrastructures.
An essential tension exists in the financial inclusion movement between its humanitarian mission and the profit-driven financial industry that will be integral to most financial inclusion efforts (Maurer et al. 2013). Despite the effort and hope being placed into an expansion of the global financial system, anthropologists have led a critique of the negative effects of financial inclusion projects, seeing familiar exploitative, depoliticizing patterns that neoliberal development has historically brought to marginalized groups (Ferguson 1994). Providing financial services to poor households can enmesh people deeper into an unequal global marketplace and unsustainable levels of debt. Skeptics of public-private social impact projects aimed at the so-called Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) fear that efforts like financial inclusion refashion marginalized groups into passive consumers, leaving them open to manipulation and exploitation (Schwittay 2011; Elyachar 2012).
Looking to the Grassroots for a New Perspective
Much of the research, criticism, and optimism around design thinking approaches to poverty alleviation focuses on projects undertaken by multinational corporations, well-funded design consultancies, and powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But what happens when the complexities of negotiating with funders and large bureaucracies are removed from the equation and designers and anthropologists are left to their own devices? In exchange for this freedom, the ideal of achieving ethical, inclusive impact design is in many ways complicated by working outside of a large organization. In the following sections, I describe how Plot and FAIR Money—two self-directed teams of ethnographers and design professionals—attempted to research and develop financial services for and with low-income populations. The teams confronted many ethical and practical challenges as they grappled with the social complexity surrounding inequality, poverty, and financial inclusion outside of the familiar constraints, guidance, and funding of working for a well-defined institutional client. The stories of these two projects are not meant to be held up as ideal models, but they do provide four valuable lessons for engaging in the messy, fraught process of translating outrage over injustice into ethical action:
- Start humbly and listen.
- Slow down and redefine what it means to act.
- Work openly and inclusively.
- Bring friends from other disciplines.
Before exploring these lessons in detail, I first introduce the teams and provide some necessary context for how their projects came to be.
ABOUT FAIR MONEY AND PLOT LONDON
In 2012, Silicon Valley, California (like much of the United States) was struggling to recover from the shock of the Great Recession. The Occupy movement had recently helped elevate conversations on wealth inequality and predatory lending into the public consciousness. In this environment, outrage over the preponderance of high-risk, high-cost financial services like payday loans being targeted at low-income communities led design researcher Marijke Rijsberman to form the FAIR Money collective. The small group she brought together primarily consists of fellow design researchers and academic social scientists from around the San Francisco Bay Area. They volunteer their spare time to address growing wealth inequality and financial precarity in their region by researching and developing ethical alternatives to predatory consumer debt. FAIR meets over a potluck lunch once a month in a member’s home. Membership is constantly shifting depending on availability and interest, but currently there are around eight regular members, many of whom have been with FAIR Money for two or more years. I have been a member of the group since attending one of their outreach events in 2013, and I began interviewing members and documenting FAIR’s monthly meetings during the spring of 2017 as part of my master’s thesis in applied anthropology at San José State University.
Figure 1. A typical FAIR Money monthly meeting (December 2016). Photograph credit Marijke Rijsberman, used with permission.
In the summer of 2016, design consultancy Plot London independently initiated a project similar to FAIR Money’s. The economic turmoil following the recent Brexit vote and what one member of the team described as a “worse than Thatcher” austerity government had highlighted the contours of the centuries-old pattern of poverty in the Tower Hamlets borough of East London. The designers at Plot London were outraged by the “poverty premium” or increased expense for everyday goods and services—particularly financial services—that wealthier people do not have to pay. The political and economic climate had made the usual corporate clients scarce for this small design consultancy, so they decided to take on a passion project to design alternative financial services for low-income people in their community. The two Plot partners teamed up with a local experience design master’s student they had been mentoring named Katie Shelly. As part of her thesis, Shelly recorded a podcast called At Your Service, which documented her work with the Plot team on their Fair Finances project. (To eliminate likely confusion, from now on, I refer to the team in Silicon Valley as ‘FAIR’ and the team in London as ‘Plot’). As an established consultancy with a dedicated studio space, Plot is more structured and focused than FAIR. However, this project was a significant deviation from Plot’s commercial design practice.
Finding Alternatives
Both groups faced the unfortunate reality that payday loans are one of the few sources of credit for many people when money is tight. For a fee, payday lenders discretely and conveniently provide small amounts of cash (up to $300 in California), regardless of credit history. These loans help people weather financial emergencies when living paycheck to paycheck. They fill the gap when the cost of living outpaces earnings. Payday loans can cover bills that come due regularly, despite inconsistent income sources like tax refunds or seasonal employment (Halpern-Meekin et al. 2015). They can also potentially destabilize the precarious finances of households. At an annual interest rate of over 400%, what might seem like a manageable one-time loan can balloon to many times the original amount borrowed, necessitating one loan to pay off another and trapping people in debt.
While they channeled their initial outrage into different forms of action, Plot and FAIR shared a belief that, with their extensive experience in ethnographic research and service design, they could identify and develop alternatives to predatory financial services like payday loans and respect the lived experiences of people using them. By partnering with individuals and organizations in their communities, Plot and FAIR could intervene in a banking industry that had, for decades, often either ignored or exploited people living on modest or inconsistent incomes (Baradaran 2015). The hope that inspired these projects can be summed up in this quote from the At Your Service podcast’s first episode:
[Mike Press, Katie Shelly’s academic advisor] Service design, if done properly, if done inclusively, is about shifting political power to people and communities.
[Katie Shelly] This definition of service design, about putting power back into the hands of ordinary people using creative tools…I love it. It’s this kind of thinking that makes me want to work in this field.
Easier said than done. As can be seen in the following sections, these projects often encountered challenges (and unexpected opportunities) as they put their ideals into action.
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