Blockchain human challenges: reflections from a design perspective

Elena Martínez Vicente

Elena Martínez

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who was best known for creating some interesting theories about modern life, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In one of his most important books, The Psychology of Science (1966) this humanistic psychologist noted that “it is tempting to think that, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you can treat anything as if it were a nail“.

Something similar happened with the boom of blockchain. This technology has been widely seen as a tool to transform how people transact, collaborate, or identify themselves. These fundamental characteristics are largely validated from a scientific or technological point of view, but with the euphoria of a new emerging technology that could transform the Internet as we know it, tech crews have started to use it like Maslow’s hammer to nails. Often, we can see examples of solutions:

That may seem more like a problem, especially if we think that the general public has to use it in a given context, e.g: opening a car in one minute with blockchain instead of 4 seconds with a key.

At P2P Models we like to look at technology with a multidisciplinary approach and question these assertions through different methodologies. One of our missions as a research team is to test blockchain with people who are part of communities. By using the Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach we have extracted several interesting insights that we would like to share.