Trax

Redesigning our engagement with taxes.

MFA Interaction Design Degree Project
Individual Project
Duration: 17 weeks, Spring 2021
Skills: ethnographic research, life centred design, speculative design, social design, research through design, AI and blockchain, storytelling, app design, concept ideation
Recognition: Golden Seed Sustainability Award 2021, Selected Graduate - Global Grad Show 2022

CHallenge

Tax touchpoints are often designed for the system behind them rather than for those interacting with them. This means that the value of taxes for the individual, society and the environment is often lost in the experience. If it is so hard for us to engage with our taxes is the system truly democratic? Could evolving blockchain and AI technology give us the opportunity to reframe how we engage with tax and make it more democratic and transparent in the process?

RESult

Trax is a system which allows people to engage with the value of taxes to the individual, society and the environment. Using 'tax tokens' people of different ages are given a more direct say into what government budgets should be supporting in their local area. The journey of allocated tax tokens can then be tracked in a fun way, highlighting their indirect impact on what we care most about.

Introducing TRAX

Allocate Tokens for Increased Agency

Using tax tokens people can bring attention to those things they care about in their environment. They are then shown the likely destinations for where the token will be most useful for that specific care point.

Tracking For Transparency

People can track the journey of their token through to the each step of the allocation decision process.

Trace

While they are out and about, people can see how some of their tax contributions have supported their surroundings, increasing a feeling of input and belonging to their local environment .

HOW IT WORKS

Citizens pay their taxes, which the government uses to divide up and equally distribute. People can then allocate tokens to the things they care about in their immediate environment and trace how to government has allocated its budgets to those things.

Approach

From Insights to Design Lenses …

Throughout the research process, I started generating probes based on insights I was gaining from user’s experiences which I then brought back to them for further insight and feedback to move forward with my process. The probes reflected different lenses throughout which you could approach designing the experience of tax.

DEsign Probes

Tax Tokens

How might we engage people with tax systems by introducing better human agency?

Traces of Tax

In the Smart Cities of tomorrow, our taxes can be seen around where we walk. As we are tracked our the traces of our taxes are made visible to us through touchpoints telling us they belong to us: much like love messages.

DATAX

Datax is another form of taxation in which you contribute to the shared whole by choosing tokens of data to pay with. Data is allocated to the services you feel are most important to you. Data from different life communities are gathered into different clusters whose priorities are all given a voice in allocation.

Timeax

TIMEAX allows you to allocate given days in which all your pay goes towards tax. All other days the money you earn working goes to you. When filing expenses you take a picture of a moment attached to that expense, so you can remember your professional spending in a different reflective moment at the end of the year.

Taxmate

Taxmate is a voice assistant helps you find ways to reduce your tax bill. It might help you find a partner who is looking to get married for a tax break, or in a speculative future, where our tax bill is based on biometric data, it might encourage you to do more exercise to avoid moving up a tax band.

Taxmas

Taxmas is a annual celebration that takes place in a reality where our cultural calandar is marked by the tax calendar.

Taxbook

Taxbook is a service in which the voices of different types of tax come alive. Each type of tax reflects what it does in society. Income tax is an architect building the infrastructure together, VAT advises you on what to buy and what not to buy, while National insurance, is a voice from the future speaking from your age of retirement.

Pocket Tax

Pocket Tax is a system in which kids can earn pocket money through house chores set by their parents. As they earn pocket money they are also taxed on their earnings, and this money goes into a communal pot for shared house items like toilet roll or food.

Smartest Home

In the Smartest Home, the house employs its human and non human inhabitants to carry out tasks to keep it nice to live in for everyone who lives in it. The smart house recognises house work as labour. In the smartest home, inhabitants get taxed in different forms that make sense to them. Plants pay for their tax in oxygen and their needs are expressed through an AI which reads their data.

Taxpaying Tree

The Taxpaying tree is attempt to get people walking through Shotover Forest in Oxford, to stop and think about what the wildlife through which they are walking could be included in a tax system. How do trees contribute to our shared world? What tax do they pay?

Speculative Tuning

When making decisions about the concept of Trax, I speculated with users over the potential long term impact of its features. This helped refine the concept and understand where it was important to put limitations

Agency

How much agency do we really want to give people in terms of allocating tax? Do we really want to live in a world where different government departments have to campaign to the public for funds?

Non Human Life

What would involving non human life forms look like in the context of civic duty like tax? Where is the line between anthropomorphisation and inclusion?

For more information on Trax, please check out the project report page.

Visit project Report

TRAX • our future engagement with taxes