Abstract
There is a wealth of contemporary scholarship pointing to ways in which money and payment media are being rapidly reconfigured through data and technology platforms, towards what Swartz terms ‘New Money’. In this article, we look at these developments through the lens of design research and ask: how might we approach the design of new money? And how can design research complement and extend critical sociological work on payment technologies, monetization and new cultural economies? To respond to these questions, we analyse a series of ‘creative transactions’ that take place on live-streaming platform Twitch. Twitch offers a rich example of payments as they are interweaved with social media. Employing Kow et al.’s (2017) framework for ‘transactional attributes’ we explore how various forms of payment and exchange in Twitch have been designed and adopted to perform relational work across a ‘transactional community’. Through this case study, we identify novel qualities and patterns of ‘new money’, and propose means and opportunities for designers to engage critically with the design of contemporary payment technologies.
Keywords
new money, creative transactions, twitch, cultural economy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.574
Citation
Elsden, C., and Speed, C. (2022) Designing new money: Creative transactions on Twitch, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.574
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Designing new money: Creative transactions on Twitch
There is a wealth of contemporary scholarship pointing to ways in which money and payment media are being rapidly reconfigured through data and technology platforms, towards what Swartz terms ‘New Money’. In this article, we look at these developments through the lens of design research and ask: how might we approach the design of new money? And how can design research complement and extend critical sociological work on payment technologies, monetization and new cultural economies? To respond to these questions, we analyse a series of ‘creative transactions’ that take place on live-streaming platform Twitch. Twitch offers a rich example of payments as they are interweaved with social media. Employing Kow et al.’s (2017) framework for ‘transactional attributes’ we explore how various forms of payment and exchange in Twitch have been designed and adopted to perform relational work across a ‘transactional community’. Through this case study, we identify novel qualities and patterns of ‘new money’, and propose means and opportunities for designers to engage critically with the design of contemporary payment technologies.