Design Thinking for Blockchains

“Block-chain needs service design to succeed”... isn’t the whole point of service design that you enter a project without fully knowing what you’re trying to solve and then figure it out a long the way?

I work digitization, so we digitize things, typically. There is a town in Denmark with a design school called Kolding, they did a digitization project with service design, that ended up with a cardboard sheet for citizens to keep track of their case history and a less noisy waiting room because service designed showed them that was what their citizens needed if the goal was to reduce stress in the case working of long term sickness. They didn’t go into this project expecting to do a non digital solution, like expecting something to save blockchain, but that’s what they ended up with through service design. It’s since improved their case working and citizen recovery immensely by the way.

Anyway, I find it interesting that people keep pushing for block chain. The largest municipality in Denmark has run some POCs on it, and even though we’re the public sector where it makes sense to have public records, blockchain aren’t the most efficient way to do it because we need to control the network. We can’t risk a mining farm taking over 51% of the workload and we certainly can’t defend even having a proof of work in a world that’s destroying the climate.

So we’d need to control the nodes anyway, and then it just doesn’t make that much sense. It may make sense for a company like Maersk who can share nodes with partners, but despite sitting on a sector which has a lot of public databases, like the land registry or ownership records, there just isn’t that much of a use for blockchain tech.

A site about design that uses a blue font on a black background. The irony.

I get the sentiment, but believe you’re missing a big part of a user’s draw to blockchain tech: its novelty.

Designers: don’t let a new tech’s unique place in time be lost. Don’t look down on a technology or its fans based on their current manefestations. This technology will only be new once. It’s okay if early adopters are attracted to the risk. Be honest, but let everyone explore and discover along the way. We are figuring this all out as we go along.

Now here's a "blockchain" example which could have been useful, but it's just another "coin" and a lot of hype.[1] The idea is to have a DRM system for assets in virtual worlds, which might be useful if VR ever gets anywhere.

When I heard about this, I thought, "they're going to use this to make assets portable". A game/VR/virtual world asset is basically a file, which has to be decrypted to be useful. It has a creator, who owns the IP rights, and an owner, who owns the copy. Currently, such property is slaved to a single game/VR/virtual world, and the owner can't move it to another one.

Think of a user A wanting to move an encrypted graphical asset created by creator B from Facebook Places to Apple's VR world. Creator B has to approve of portability between the two worlds, and user A has to request the transfer, but Facebook Places has no say, because they don't own the asset.

Now that's what I thought High Fidelity was doing. Nah. It's just another token with a complex backstory that doesn't do much. They're talking about a way for creators to prove ownership. All you need for that is a cryptographic time-stamping service. Those already exist. When you create something, you take the hash of it and get that time-stamped. Now you can show priority. No blockchain needed.

[1] https://blog.highfidelity.com/tagged/blockchain

That is correct. It is actually all about marketing. For example, there shouldn't be a huge difference between something working intuitively vs using AI/ML. But somehow parading it as something build on AI gives a lot of airtime and credence to an extent.