Chris Elsden

This workshop will tackle the challenge of designing and configuring money as an interface, exploring and developing an HCI-centred perspective on the nature of money. Money as an interface involves moving beyond classical economic ideas, to focus instead on money as a social technology, on its relational qualities, and on how these could be expressed in design, and configured in context. The workshop will bring together HCI researchers, designers and practitioners, who will submit design contexts in which more configurable, flexible and collaborative forms of money would be desirable or socially meaningful. These contexts will become the design provocations to be addressed together during the workshop. The outcome will be a catalogue of design proposals inspiring future directions for more flexible, configurable, collaborative and relational financial technologies.

Children’s encounters with money are increasingly shaped by cashless, platform-based, and gaming systems, however limited HCI research examines how children experience and negotiate these changes. This paper presents preliminary findings from a mixed-method, participatory design futuring study with children aged 10–11 in a UK primary school, a key stage when children typically shift from cash to digital money, and experience growing financial autonomy. Conducted over a period of 5 weeks, the study involved surveys, workshops, focus groups, and interviews, exploring children’s experiences of multiple economies and visions for future financial systems. Initial findings show that children actively navigate cash, digital money, and in-game currencies, valuing visibility, safety, and control, while expressing concerns about scams and financial harm, particularly in games. Through speculative ‘super-inventions,’ children’s work revealed tensions between protection and autonomy, highlighting opportunities for designing financial technologies that would better support and educate children during this critical transition.