What if we could create a digital wallet that helps us to save, spend and budget our money and rewards us when we meet our targets or advises us when doing the alternative? What if our digital wallet could help us connect socially to help the community save money?

There are currently a plethora of digital wallet apps available so we we didn’t just want to create another app but set about envisioning a platform that would utilise a two way dialogue between the user and app. Inspired by Apple’s Siri we wanted the user to be able to engage with the app and be able to ask for information along with receiving it.

We set about creating a ‘voice’ and functions/features for the app along with potential scenarios that would be able to convey this two-way dialogue and also importantly the consequences and effects of this communication. Along with receiving factual information regarding your finances the app would also allow you to connect via your social networks and partake in the shared economy. But not only this, we imagine the app to be able to advise the user on actions that will have a direct impact on their expenditure. So in effect the app could alert you to going over budget and alert other devices that are connected via the IoT so that your devices are affected depending on your actions and there is a direct cause and effect following the decisions you make according to your finances .

Obviously this does entail looking at the ethics involved but we also think that it is an interesting premise to look at in the light of technology using our data to control us even when we are told it’s for our benefit. It does throw up questions of how far should we go allowing technology into our lives and if we are comfortable with the sharing of our data between multiple devices and in our scenario having a direct correlation between our actions and our devices? Whilst the app doesn’t directly answer these questions it does start to look at the kind of relationship that could evolve between technology and the user and the kind of two-way dialogue that could arise from that.

– Working alongside Lara Di Ferdinando, Chi-Che Hsu, Qianyu Luo and Katavet Sittikit –