Money on Wheels

Getting things done in Liverpool Street, London,

Having been exposed on a daily basis to this extraordinary marketing effort - some lines before the tsunami reaches us.

Many have debated the security issues coming with this new way of settling your bills. But maybe it might be also interesting to anticipate what this way of payment does to the felt value of the transaction itself.

When debit and credit cards were introduced, the perception of the actual value of the sums transferred changed significantly and continues to challenge those who use cards not to spend beyond their means. The main reason being to the day that payments by card are of a far more abstract nature than a payment in cash and people naturally struggle to visualise the transaction as such.

A swipe of a card with no signature or any other means of verification certainly does not stimulate the consciousness of having made a purchase. If this scheme really suceeds with what it was designed for, then so called micro payments will indeed become irreducible - in the users perception.

Combined with your debit or credit card this scheme becomes the perfect tracking device, since it covers the segment, which had been spared by the reach of plastic until now.

On the website of payWave the ‘tremendous’ amount of time the user of the scheme has saved, is the main hook to sell it to us - the consumers. Coming from an interaction design point of view, which in its core subscribes to the notion to increase the transparency of processes where possible and aims to empower the user - this leaves a bittersweet taste.

There is a clear benefit in relieving the waste disposal of several dozens of tons of waste a day through replacing the paper based tickets with a plastic card with a money charged chip on it (yes we’re talking RFID). But the Oyster Card has also changed our experience when travelling.

In the past four days three friends of mine were caught in three separate instances in the barriers simply because they did not have sufficient funds on their prepaid card. And all were totally baffled, insisting that they have travelled on that very day enough to qualify for a day ticket.

You don’t know what that means? Well let me explain: There is a special tariff: a day ticket. With this ticket you can use public transport as much as you want for the duration of a day – you simply pay a fixed amount of money. The pricing scheme is designed to make this day ticket attractive if you use the tube more than three times a day. For a sprawling city like London that makes this ticket very attractive for a lot of people.

The Oyster Card is supposed to work like this: You use it on the Railway, Tubes, trams and buses and as soon as all the single tariffs accumulate a day tickets worth the Oyster card allows you to travel as if you would have bought a day ticket at the start of your journey.

My friends, who were so surprised at not having enough funds on their Oyster Cards all thought that the heavy use of their oyster card on this very day made them qualify for the day ticket tariff.
Now the question is are my friends all really crap in maths or was the “system” wrong.

Well it doesn’t really matter here – since it’s worth pointing out one major thing: We are not longer consciously aware of how much we pay for public transport since the experience of paying for a journey has significantly changed.

In pre-Oyster Card times we had to make our minds up whether we will use the transport often enough on the very day to opt for a day ticket. And there was no doubt whatsoever how much we paid for the travelling. Today we trust a system to cap it in our favour. And since it is out of our hands, we automatically foster some form of distrust.

Is it a fair question to ask how good we feel about using Oyster Cards and trust them to cap in our favour? I for one know that I would love to have a little switch on my Oyster Card which I can press knowing that on my first “Touch-In” I will have started my day ticket!

For everybody to see, this is a box fitted with two phones (the second one being on the other side) and a cash machine. Obviously the company behind it combined the two applications based on the usage of the same infrastructure and thought this would be a good idea. Which it might be - with the cash machine doing significantly better.

Since the usage of the two services is in terms of interaction very similar, I thought it might be quite interesting to put this academic question forward: How would a device look like which combines the two services? How would one use it? What would the user experience be like for the respective services?

What is the connection between the two? Well, there is none really. The reporting of the Apple O2 deal can be found everywhere. The label telling us the footprint of CO2 for each bag of crisps hardly makes it.

Well this is no surprise, but yet there is an interesting observation to be made: While there are attempts to enable the individual to make a buying decision based on how environmentally friendly a product is, the carousel of gadget updates with the massive output of CO2 turns faster and faster. The iPod iPhone can be seen as only a representative - just look how regularily we update our mobile phones for newer, slimmer more potent ones.

When has the time come that a producer addresses the sticky question with our gadgets? Just a thought.

Whether there is any credibility with these claims? We can’t possibly know, since it is not easy to verify and the boundaries between technical necessities and commercially led intent are blurry at times. For instance if Google wants to distinguish between real clicks with their AdSense Product and some user who wants to either make some money, or make others pay is clicking a hundred times on the same “sponsored” link, cookies won’t do - and the IP address is the safest bet to filter these clicks. With the IP address Google then is able to know pretty well where you are, what your cultural background most likely is, store search terms affiliated with this particular IP address and so on.

What we do know though, and what this post shall be about, is that there are enormous regional differences. And they are certainly not down to the different up-to-date state of serves - as often stated.

Let’s say you search for Shakespeare (yes the poet) on the German Portal of the Californian Company and on the British counterpart.

On both the first result belongs to Google - more specifically to Google’s Book Department. The following results are very different on the two portals. The German Portal favouring sites in German, though the search was performed with the option “Das Web”( transl.: “Search the Web”) in place.

Though the diffrences don’t matter so much with great personalities, since you’ll still manage to get the equal share of information if you are persistent enough to get through at least the first three pages, it starts to matter a great deal if you are searching for more contemporary or short lived subjects.

Let’s say you search for something technical, like a certain Javascript Library - the pattern that the German portal displays more sites in German persists - but from a quality point of view the differences can be stark (the number of German speaking sites against English speaking ones surpisingly matters!). It seems that the priority of the guessed native language, overrules other aspects like relevance in quite a dramatic fashion. It is quite possible that you’ll never find a particular reference on the German Portal which features on the first result page on the British portal.

Interestingly enough if you search from a German IP address you’ll be forwarded onto the German portal even if you would like to search on the American (main) portal (www.google.com).

Now of course there is a whole bunch of well meant arguments which make the case for regionally optimised search results, but what are the implications? Surely if a whole culture or an language area (in this example Germany, Austria, Switzerland) are constently served fairly reduced differing information by the quasi monopolist, the knowledge base of that area will start to differ.

Of course these differences where always in place, but what is interesting is, that the algorithms of Google become in fact a cultural determinator in the long run. How does that fare with our current perception of the free world and its ultimate medium: the Internet? If Google isn’t Google everywhere - what precisely is Google?

Hamburg based gallery CAI showed the work of Japanese Artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu at the Tristesse Deluxe Gallery in Berlin, Karl-Marx-Allee. In his work, Yoshiaki uses outerwear - and in this instance the jackets of a particular sponsor - as the source material for sewed animals. These animals are attached to the still recognisable source - so that it looks like that there is a metamorphosis going on.

The entertaining process with you is, that the portrayed animals lend their characters to the fashion item. For me at least, a pink training top will never look the same again.

Interestingly enough another big sportswear company launched an advertising campaign earlier this year, showing work by Federico Uribe who also used products by the manufacturer as base material.