Moneywork: Practices of Use and Social Interaction around Digital and Analog Money

Abstract

The emergence of various forms of digital money and innovative digital financial services allows stores of value to be created, held, moved, measured and exchanged in novel ways. Yet the success of these new forms of transactional media is largely dependent on the ways that they are understood as useful and credible as viable forms of exchange, and on how they support the ways that their users interact around them. This paper therefore examines interactional work around the use of money in making financial transactions: we call this moneywork. We report on an empirical study of the patterns of behaviour of users of a mixed media (digital and analog) currency that supports mobile device payments–the Bristol Pound– exploring the impacts of its users’ understanding of the systems that underlie these transactions, the technical constraints on their potential for action, their practices of use, and the social interactions that these activities lie within. We draw design implications to support these payment practices.