The last project before i started with my master thesis was an individual project in cooperation with the biggest south-american bank, Itaú. The brief asked us to think about the future of banking. We could choose our own focus almost unrestrictedly. That led to a very diverse range of great results in our class.
I decided to work on the aspect of shared living expenses. It was a choice based on personal experiences, but I received feedback from countless people that supported my ideas.
Here is the result in form of an animation and the abstract.
"Companion is a banking service aligned with the special needs of shared living communities.
A lot of people live in shared flats as it offers numerous benefits. Even though the motivation to move into a shared flat is as different as the people who live in them, it is apparent that sharing goods supports a good atmosphere and vice versa. Companion supports this reciprocity by providing a flexible solution every shared living community can adapt to their needs.
The service consists of a bank-account, a web- and a mobile application and physical tokens, the companions themselves. The bank account can be used to collect monthly contributions to do regular payments like rent, electricity and internet and to save money for other shared expenses.
Each tenant owns one companion, that is recognizable by a color
chosen before. The companions visualize the shared flats financial situation in a simplified way: If there are debts amongst the flatmates, if one tenant is very successful in saving money for the community or if the shared accounts balance is growing or getting smaller.
As the companions are placed in the shared space of a flat, they become a part of everyday life, supporting the sharing and saving behavior by using the rules the tenants agreed upon."
I got a lot of insights from a workshop i conducted at UID. 12 people from the Interaction-, Advanced Product- and Transportation Design program shared their ideas and experiences they had on my project.
One personal goal I set for myself was building an experiential prototype that is as close as possible to the final products physical appearance. Using an Arduino Mini Pro, the TexasInstruments TLC5940 LED driver and an "optimized" breadboard layout made it possible to achieve that goal.
The prototype was part of an exhibition at school. The next step would have been fitting the technical components into the product design i did for the project.
