Money on the Edge: Designing for Extremes in Venezuela

This video was shot in San Cristóbal, Venezuela in March 2019. It shows people lined up around several city blocks to withdraw some of the local currency, bolivars, from the largest bank branch in the city. Cash is scarce but necessary, so people put up with hours of waiting.

Venezuelans are also experiencing hyperinflation. While some nations’ economies achieve an annual inflation rate below 5%, the Venezuelan government statistics registered over 130,000% inflation in 2018. In simple terms, if you had $1,000,000 worth of Venezuelan bolivars in 2018, you’d be left with less than $800 by the end of the year. The International Monetary Fund projected the 2019 inflation rate to be even more dramatic: over 1,000,000%.

Furthermore, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed — goods are either hard to find or impossible to afford. People like Lorena (pictured) flee while trying to preserve their savings using whatever means they have access to. Here, Lorena shows how she hid money in her hair as she crossed the border seeking work to support her family in Venezuela.

These scenes are just two of many we would come to witness.

Project Background

In January 2019, the Open Money Initiative initiated its first project focused on the Venezuelan monetary crisis. We started with a question:

How might we use technology to serve Venezuelans who are currently under monetary and economic duress?

We also sought to understand what people’s key needs were around money, financial health, safety and well-being.

Over the last several months, we shared our research findings through dedicated workshops with our generous sponsors and at conferences. Now we’d like to share our research with you. Over the coming weeks we will share our research approach, findings and provocations.

Project Approach

The intention behind our research is to impel action — we weren’t only interested in surveying the current context. Rather, our work is intended to bridge the current context to a more optimistic future that designers, technologists and makers can play a role building.

That said, we are aware that the domains we focused on, products and technology, are only one small piece of the puzzle. Building a strong civil society, justice system and democratic government are necessary foundations for true systemic change.

Our process and methods are design-led. We focus on people, their stories, attitudes and behaviors. Understanding why people behave a certain way helps us generate concept products, services and tools that could serve Venezuelans now. More than anything, our approach is focused on understanding the human experience in Venezuela.

Additionally, design research is distinct from large-scale quantitative or statistical research. Our methods are qualitative and focused on learning from extreme users or outliers, rather than the mainstream. Talking to extreme users exposes us to hacks, design opportunities and use cases that can be applied to a broader audience.

What We Did

We used a variety of methods to capture different types of data. All of our participants were compensated for participating in our research, and their names were changed in our notes and records to protect their privacy and safety.

The core of our work involved conducting ethnographic interviews, administering diary studies, and carrying out displacements.

Ethnographic Interviews (17 in Venezuela and Colombia with recent migrants)

We conducted 17, two-hour-long interviews — in-person and remote — to understand what matters to the Venezuelans we met. We looked for stories of work-arounds, successes and failures, normative behaviors, tensions in how they think of themselves and discrepancies between what they say they do and what they actually do.

We focused on extreme users or outliers. Here are three of the people we met:

• Ana Maria, age 22, engineering student that mines bitcoin and supports her family with this income.
• Anton, age 30, former coffee farmer that walked over the border to Colombia after being beaten by government officials for selling his coffee above the fixed government price.
• Sara, age 37, health sciences professor that cannot pay her bills with her professional salary. She earns money by helping foreign college students write papers over the internet.

Diary Study

To understand the individual day-to-day experience, we tasked 16 participants with filling out a survey for 7 days. Every day we asked people about their well-being, money, financial health, safety and struggles via video, voice and text messages.

Displacement Studies (x2)

We conducted specifically designed behavioral probes to see how participants navigate complexity, uncertainty, and new tools and products. We conducted two experiments with Bitcoin.

In one displacement, we challenged 18 participants to use bitcoin to buy goods or services. They had to overcome the bitcoin learning curve themselves, and also seek out sellers accepting bitcoin or negotiate with sellers that were not accepting it.

In the second displacement, we challenged a money-changer to use bitcoin, rather than digital dollars, as an intermediate currency between Colombian pesos and bolivars.

Synthesis

After spending a month immersed in field work in Colombia and Venezuela, we spent several weeks intricately combing our data for commonalities, differences, trends, incongruities, emergent questions, interesting work-arounds and hacks.

Coming up

Over the next blog posts, we will share our research findings and concepts of products and services that could be useful to Venezuelans.