We need to move the conversation forward regarding the skills that we as Creative Problem Solvers will need to facilitate a mainstream-adoption of blockchain-based applications. This thought-piece is intended for both Designers who have little understanding of the blockchain and the more advanced strategists who are currently bombarded with requests to develop new products and services with the transformative technology. If you’re already well-versed in the issues, feel free to skim the first section, but we need you to accept the call-to-action to join us in the conversation of developing the new skillsets, tools, and frameworks to facilitate this rapidly expanding opportunity space.

We are in a data crisis. For decades, and by some accounts centuries, massive amounts of data have been captured and stored in centralized silos under the control of 3rd parties – and sometimes oppressively. Business models abound on the use of this data and as long as it’s not “personally identifying,” those 3rd parties find it fair-game to leverage that data to generate immense amounts of revenue and other intangible value to their organizations.

“So, what?” you might say. Well, some find it off-putting that while they’re out and about shopping with friends or working for their employer or for themselves, that another party such as their phone carrier or an app or another service provider they gave permission to track their activities (under the guise of simple added convenience or extra entertainment) is able to capitalize handsomely on those activities even with unrelated business; that is, out of the context of the original agreement in which the data was shared.

Maybe that’s not a big deal. Maybe you consider it a fair trade. Sometimes the added convenience or whatever we trade for lack of privacy is valuable. It is pretty awesome stepping out the car to have its location automatically pinned on the map so the shortest path back home is easily pulled up. But, let me ask, if you could be compensated by these multibillion-dollar market cap companies, would you accept payment? I would. And I’d want it on my own terms. Of course, even if that were possible, can we trust that we’ll be fairly compensated? How would we know?

Trust in mainstream journalism has been all but destroyed. The current, centralized mainstream media, no matter your political persuasion, has created a disingenuous trifecta of distrust where the objective of generating ad revenue competes with honest reporting: As audiences we get clickbaity headlines while trapped in our echo-chambers with little more than opinions and semantics intended to persuade instead of inform. And then we’re stuck with the bill of inflated data-access costs for the unwanted and irrelevant advertisements. And advertisers get inflated visitor numbers through abusive bots. So, there is falsification and deception in multiple directions.

The centralization of data has also created a further divide of access to basic economic and financial needs for developing cultures and societies. Whether by corrupt dictatorships or voted in by democratic processes, massive intermediation and taxation on all steps in supply chains has inflated costs which are invariably passed on to the end-consumers.

And what about protecting this data? Is our data secure? After breaches and misappropriations such as what happened with Equifax, Facebook-Cambridge Analytica, and now, Under Armor — just to name a few of the recent notables, the crisis to keep our identities safe is growing exponentially. Even our government which is supposed to be the one group to act in our best interest is spending billions and billions of our tax dollars, but not always able to live up to its promise (Snowden/NSA, IRS/Tea Party, Office of Personnel Management breach).

And perhaps the most common concern-area is “identity” as it is the basis for empowerment, but the crisis is real: identity theft and proof of identity especially in the scenarios for refugees has left populations exposed and vulnerable.

Our dependence on these centralized systems managed by 3rd parties puts everyone’s ability to transact in the global economy at risk.

Ending our Addiction to Centralization

Truly, we are addicted to centralized systems. Everything from governments to banks to media to ID systems to our rolodex to even our family photo storage. When it comes to managing systems for complex decision-making that requires keeping our data, it’s easier and more efficient to abdicate to a central 3rd party. Sometimes, we have no choice; that is, it’s part of regulation and law.

As innovators, we intend to change this via blockchain. At the risk of over-simplifying, blockchain the underlying concept of encrypted distributed ledgers and decentralized storage and processing of data that gave us cyptocurrencies. It has much further implications for creating transparent, verifiable, and immutable data stores far beyond tokens. Blockchain-based approaches to managing transaction data are not necessarily earth-shattering, but they are foundational and transformative; however, it’s the soon-to-come application layer that will be disruptive. It will take some time to educate and bring awareness to the issues and potential solutions, but this is what we must do to eventually break our dependency and abdication of a prized resource — our data.

This is not to say that all centralized systems are inherently bad. There are many that work just fine, but the question is, are they optimal? At what risk are they? I’m simply saying that as we question every proposal for new systems, we should question the reasons for existing systems as well.

But Can Users Really Manage and Protect Their Own Data?

Many of the innovations coming out in the crypto/blockchain space are attempting to maximize this decentralization model and putting all data in the hands of its owners — which seems very empowering on the surface, but this will be overwhelming and without systems and services architectures that are considering all facets of the problems, our ecosystems will fail.

For example, if we were to have self-sovereign IDs that kept all of the data from our credit reports, health records, property and real estate ownership, etc etc were solely stored on our own devices and not in centralized systems, it becomes less attractive to thieves because there are no central honey pots and the very high costs to attack multiple decentralized nodes for a lot less information (single vs. multitude) — decentralization theoretically disincentives data theft.

While that sounds great, think about only one aspect of that proposition: an Electronic Medical/Health Record (EMR or EHR) system. Medical data admins have to go to school for years to learn how to run these things efficiently. How do we expect mere mortals to manage the record sets of how many 1000’s of data points? Across how many systems? For how many use cases?

And what about the rapid expansion of wealth? When I think about the potential for redistribution of power and wealth, I can’t help but think of the rags-to-riches-back-to-rags athletes who never learned how to adequately deal with wealth. Or how many lottery winners regret ever winning in the first place a few short years later. These are real problems that many in the community are not thinking about and as empaths, we need to design products and services that will not merely have safety nets thus reverting right back to our dependency for centralization (think: too-big-to-fail), but rather equip our new, fragile ecosystems for sustainability on their own.

This could all be explored in many more thought pieces, but one other threat: Market Makers. These are the individuals and institutions that are so large that when they make a decision to move, massive populations and eco-systems move with them (think Apple Computer, Facebook, Warren Buffet, George Soros, Koch Brothers, etc). These influencers and others like them are are not going away and they will always see the world as a zero-sum game. No matter how much their corporate responsibility statements to the contrary and they’re trying to bring “a tide that raises all boats.” They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders first. Fortunately, many investors are coming around to the idea of “impact investing” and beginning to see the value, but how can we trust they are in fact acting in a broader interest outside of their selves?

So, it’s not just about storage and managing the “data on your persons.” We must consider transacting with all of that data. The actual interactions with others in these new, ecosystems of personal data empowerment. We will never get rid of bad actors who want to manipulate or strive for selfish, personal gain and take advantage of others, but we can design the systems and interfaces to instill trust in our own ability and others to make better decisions.

A (Brief) History on the Cambrian Information-Explosion

Alongside an exponential growth in human population, throughout the 20th century, thanks to computers and telephony, we saw a rapid expansion in our ability to communicate — across towns, across regions, across borders, across oceans. The human-experience was no longer localized to a small collective of neighbors who self-governed through tribal leadership. The ability to act and be informed has been overwhelmingly empowering.

In the 1970s, architect and visionary, Richard Saul Wurman (TED Talks, et al), in his response to the information explosion saw the need for systemic design processes to bring order to the rampant data (not information) and fifteen years later he made a call for the “Information Architects” to bring order to the overwhelming amount of data and information with which we were contending. Design leaders like Christina Wodkte, Lou Rosenfeld, and Peter Morville took up the torch and mixed the Library Sciences with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) which draws heavily from the Cognitive Sciences and applies it to technology.

In the 70–80s, Xerox PARC in developing the first computer graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and made references to the elegance with which we needed to structure information; that is, actually use the data.

With the deeper focus on the “human experience” and the “experience economy” in the 1990’s and 2000’s, Designers advocated that products and services be created from research of user, or human-centered processes that sought to consider the many contexts of use and meaning human’s ascribe to the world around them. This required observational studies and applied research through Anthropology, Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence — Cognitive Science. By understanding how we derive meaning and how our experiences change depending where or when we interface technology and making that technology adapt, we created devices and digital services that were deeply, emotionally connecting for users.

On top of just being usable, technology needed to be useful and intuitive which gave way to bringing surprises and moments of delight — adequate and elegant design that just makes the technology underneath disappear.

In the 2000s, as social media and ubiquitous computing continued to surge, we used to preach about Choice Architecture — concept proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” I recall how we sought to design systems that would maintain the end-users’ autonomy, but made it easier for them to make better decisions by using “nudges” — an amazing way to instill trust.

Cloud Infrastructure, while definitely a technical shift in how storage and computing power is delivered, there was also paradigm shift in understanding file hierarchy which gave an even bigger rise for a need to strategically tag and use meta data. Governance over content became a thing with which Content Strategists had to contend.

Design Thinking and Strategic Design was a call for Designers to better understand business and entrepreneurialism. So, we needed to build empathy for not just our end-users, but also for the business managers and technologists that needed to deliver and since we were all responsible to deliver “Experience,” as the facilitator, Designers needed to understand the languages of business and technology so we could communicate and lead.

And we did a good job. By facilitating innovations between business and technology that resonated deeply with the human condition, billions of people the world over have no problem putting their most personal information into systems without really knowing how these systems work. And the vast majority of us don’t even care as it’s now just part of normal behavior.

Now we even have “Gig Economies” and “Shared Economies” — simple ways for all of us to make a little extra cash which is just normal stuff by today’s expectations.

The thing is, now we’re all so freaking vulnerable. Thanks to fiascos mentioned above such as Equifax and currently Facebook-Cambridge Analytica, my hope is that we’re waking up.

As Designers and UXers, we’re somewhat responsible for this and obligated to fix it. Our constituents need us to design environments that combat the mounting distrust.

We need a new type of Designer: Trust Architects

Just as we strengthened our understanding of cognitive science, business, and technology to create better user experiences, we need to again expand the scope of our discipline. Because blockchain is supposedly this so-called “trustless” technology; that is, the distributed data and transactions are simultaneously verifiable and immutable, there is no need to “trust” its accuracy. Blockchain is enabling an Internet of Value (what does even mean?) As Designers, it’s now our job to make the technology disappear and do what we do best — make it usable, useful, meaningful and even surprising and delightful.

Recently, speaking with Sarah Baker Mills, a fellow Designer in the blockchain space and her perspective is “Designers are Facilitators.” Which I completely agree — our value as Designers to the world is being comfortable with ambiguity, change, disruption, failure, fuzzy unknowns, messy emotions and the ugly uncertainties. And because we’re empaths, we’re great facilitators for extracting decision-making power out of others. Whether that be making the observations, gathering and organizing the information, modeling the perspective and telling the stories through visuals, data, prototypes or what have you, Designers bring institutions into the “what if’ing” of innovation and to the convergence of action.

So, that also puts Designers as Educators. As mentioned above, we need to bring awareness to the issues and discuss the possibilities — which means we need to further expand our vocabulary and conceptual frameworks to be effective.