Who wants to build the blockchain bifrost?
A look at the challenges of blockchain development & why design thinking might just be the boost it needs
The bifrost is the the rainbow bridge that connects Asgard, the world of the Aesir tribe of gods, with Midgard the world of humanity. If you know your Norse Mythology (or pretend you do but really only have seen the movie Thor) you are probably familiar with the bifrost.
Crypto is a hot and sexy topic. Indeed, it is not uncommon to overhear conversations about the fluctuating value of bitcoin, ethereum, the challenges of getting into exchanges and even ICOs on the tram, in your favourite coffee shops and even at your office water cooler.
Unfortunately, not a lot of people understand the technology behind it. A survey which polled 2,000 people from the UK and 1,000 from Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Singapore, the UAE, and the US found that 80 percent of those who have heard of blockchain don’t understand what it is.
In reality, not a lot of people understand the technology let alone know how to build on it. Those who do build on it go through the painstaking journey of scouring the internet for references, setting up workspaces, understanding the different concepts of gas, mining, contracts, tokens, discovering punks, frogs, the undead and cats on the blockchain. The list just goes on and on and on. Indeed one could say, you’d feel like a Norse god if you do manage to get your first contract live on the main net.
And while there have been new and creative ways to learn all of these, the focus has always been on wrestling with the technology.
Enter, stage left, design thinking. Modern product development uses this interactive approach to get a deeper understanding of customer needs to shape and deliver the right product and customer value.
Design thinking, according to IDEO “brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable”.
It is an innovation process that takes a human-centered approach to exploring opportunities and challenges and finding solutions to solve these. In a nutshell it involves developing an understanding of the people that a product is being designed for through an iterative process of ongoing experimentation to try out concepts and ideas until a viable solution is found.
With blockchain development still in its considerable infancy and understanding of its viability in implementing use cases still yet to be fully grasped this approach to development seems like the perfect boost blockchain development needs. With the technology barriers mentioned above however it is no surprise that this approach has barely made its way to blockchain development.
Experience designers, researches, product owners — experts on this field who are more adept to working with users and who potentially may have the key to understanding the secret sauce behind blockchain have a steep learning curve to deal with. If the barrier to blockchain development is already steep for developers imagine how hard it would be for someone completely new to the technology
Therein lies the challenge. How might we bridge this gap for blockchain co-creators — developers and designers alike to help them build on the blockchain faster? How might we speed this ideation & innovation process to find what could possibly be the next best thing this technology has to offer? How might we build that rainbow bridge between blockchain and the world of humanity?
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