Product Designer
with experience shipping design & code for web & mobile interfaces since 2017.
Product Designer
with experience shipping design & code for web & mobile interfaces since 2017.
Prototyping Mesh: An Open Financial System for IDEO’s CoLab
Product/UX Design
A Mesh prototype explanation by my teammate, Jeremy Ney, published to the IDEO CoLab Youtube channel.
Context:
The IDEO CoLab is a branch of the legendary IDEO company, focused on prototyping emerging technologies in collaboration with a portfolio of companies and a network of design technologists and policy-makers.
The Problem:
What happens to the micro-economics of a community when internet connectivity is out of the question? (ex. power outages, natural disasters, rural areas of low internet connection)
The Solution:
A proposed community-wide mesh network, with Raspberry Pi nodes
communicating through Bluetooth protocols.
This network allows for peer-to-peer transactions by creating a shared ledger that is uploaded to utility vehicles (such as US Postal Service trucks), which then download the ledger transactions to their appropriate financial institutions upon reaching an area of higher internet connectivity.
My Role:
Product designer working with two other teammates, a policy expert from Harvard/MIT and a finance expert from Fidelity.
Impact:
With the IDEO CoLab’s focus on future-facing projects, impact is hard to quantify in a traditional product sense. However, this project did spark new and important conversations on the direction of open financial systems.