Blockchain Designer Profile: Carl Fairclough
Designing user experience for payment and collaborative systems
With over six hundred people on board and offices popping up all over the world in places like London and Dubai, things are moving so fast at ConsenSys — and the blockchain world in general — that’s it’s tough to keep up with all the movement behind the scenes.
To offer a little more insight to the human side of the ConsenSys mission, we’re profiling many of the remarkable individuals who dream up the design end experiential elements of ConsenSys projects…
Meet Carl Fairclough, UX Designer.
How did you get involved in blockchain?
I’ve probably always been very ideologically aligned with the people involved in blockchain, but I wasn’t aware of that until shortly before I joined ConsenSys. I was freelancing, and that evolved into figuring out how to build collaborative systems without single points of control. Myself and people I’d worked with created a collective, and in turn, worked on a collaboration framework for freelancers. Through lots of discussion (and Alex Singh yelling CARL, LOOK AT BLOCKCHAIN, PLEASE time and time again), I figured that hey, I should probably look at blockchain. So, I looked at blockchain.
As a designer-who-can-build-stuff I was thinking: “Wow, I don’t understand this at all”, and didn’t look at it again for a few months. Then, after the collective lost steam, I came back around, reached out to some people and started to think about how the technology could be applied to so many different aspects of society. It all went from there.
What are you working on now?
Joining ConsenSys also involved a move to Dubai for me, where I’ve spent time working on projects which tie into the Dubai Blockchain Initiative — getting an entire city to leverage blockchain tech in areas where it could be beneficial. After helping to define paradigms on a key project, I’m now spending most of my time working on a decentralised payment system (quiet your yawns). It comes with a ton challenges, especially given the context.
People involved in tech and cryptocurrencies are aware of how it all functions, but your average person is not. We’ve got this strange situation where the usability barrier to entry is incredibly high, while all of the other barriers are almost non-existent. How do we fix that?
So far, the process has involved a lot of abstraction, a lot of rethinking terminology and a lot of researching challenges faced by organisations in the past. For example: the idea of a payment card has taken well over a century to reach its current point, from a stamped coin with an ID and Institution name all the way to a… card with the ID stamped… digitally. That business card shaped paradigm is old and ripe for change, but it’s also embedded in the public consciousness. How can we both piggyback on that and facilitate a shift away from it — without using credit as an incentive?
As a part of this, we’ve set a clear focus on audiences which have been marginalised as a result of their financial/environmental situations, and helping to provide them the means to trade value seamlessly, without the bounds of existing financial institutions.
What do you enjoy about the blockchain space?
I think it’s one of the keys to enable a (hyperbole incoming) revolution. There are so many things which are democratising what have been very closed, powerful, value-extracting areas of society:
Energy
We’re transitioning away from oil & fossil fuels, to renewable energy and home-based solar power. The technology is getting less and less expensive every year; what happens when people need to pay negligible amounts to power their homes & devices?
Politics
With a yearning for transparency & fairness from corporations/politicians, and people having unprecedented access to information; what systems can we put in place to enable a true democracy with informed decision making?
Communication
The internet is ubiquitous. Everybody is connected. How can we connect people in a better way? What happens if we treat communication tools — social networks — as services for public-good rather than for advertising?
Sharing
In a world clearly shifting towards a sharing economy, how do we share energy, power, and information in a truly open, self-improving way?
All of these things are undeniably related, and it’s my opinion that blockchain is the tool which enables us to connect the dots; it has huge ramifications on how we function & make decisions; it has the potential to become the fabric of society. Participating in the discussions at this nascent stage is exciting.
Unfortunately not everybody shares this view of the blockchain space, and lots of people associate it with the twitter-cryptocurrency sphere. There’s a lot of HODL TO THE MOON noise, drowning out the everything-else crowd, and in a world where more and more people gather knowledge via social media, it’s a problem which I find disheartening.
That being said, as an advocate for an open, fair society, who am I to judge? Maybe the world will transition to one filled with crypto-oligarchs; making sure you have skin in that game is… smart. Probably.
- Person with the biggest rock
- Feudal lords
- Capitalists
- Cryptowinners
But what if society at large becomes a winner? What will decisions look like inside that society, and how will governance change? Who decides on military spending vs medical vs exploration spending? What will the concept of spending even mean?
What are some of the challenges you face when designing for users of decentralized apps?
Support, instilling confidence & lowering the technical bar. Like I mentioned, there are so many parallels in the blockchain space with how the payment card was created, but the difference is that we’re trying to get this stuff out there now. Banking institutions spent well over 100 years to get to their current, highly standardised point.
Language
Blockchain, smart contracts, transaction hash, private key, public key, gas, gwei. It’s an onboarding nightmare. People will take the path of least resistance, and right now, blockchain-based products have a far steeper learning curve than centralised tools. We should be abstracting the weight of these terms away, but making them visible so that people become more familiar with them over time.
Support
If you’re building a platform, the idea is decentralisation, right? So how do you plan on supporting it? If somebody loses their private key, we should have distributed methods of recovery. It unethical to design a platform which throws somebody to the wolves if they lose access to an aspect of their identity. It’s also antithetical to blockchain to have centralised methods of recovery (i.e. being a bank). What should the best practice for distributed recovery mechanisms look like?
Confidence
This goes back to language, if people don’t understand the terms, they’ll be intimidated. Gentle introductions are key until terms become common language and form a part of culture (i.e. small children understanding gestural interfaces vs me having to google how to open the control centre on an iPhone X).
What advice do you have for a designer new to blockchain?
Align yourself. You don’t need to know how to write a smart contract, but you do need to get an idea of how the technology can be applied. Learn about what a distributed ledger is, why gas is required, then figure out how you think blockchain could improve society and make sure you work to make that happen.
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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of ConsenSys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
