Three Wild Concepts for the Future of Money

Method

When the new iPhones hit shelves a couple weeks ago, it came with a new way to pay for stuff. Want a bagel? Now all you have to do is hover your phone near the card reader and the NFC antenna will transmit your banking information. It’s frictionless, and a little bit sci-fi in its ease, but it’s only the most recent in a long line of tech-focused ways to spend our money. Before Apple Pay, there was Google Wallet, Venmo, Square, Stripe, and PayPal (and that’s just naming a few).

The point being, money is a changing—not its value, but how we go about spending it—and it’s going to keep changing. This got the designers at London design firm Method thinking: How might we be interacting with money in five, ten or even 20 years? If we removed all assumptions about how money should behave, what would happen?

Over the course of a few months, the designers conducted social experiments to investigate future use cases for currency. “We wanted to take a step back from those everyday problems and really think about some of the major trends that we felt were going to affect these experiences in the future,” says Philip O’Dwyer, Method’s executive creative director. Here’s what they found.

Experiment One: What if Your Payments Were Public?