Digitizing Monetary Ecologies Article Swipe
YOU?
·
· 2018
· Open Access
·
· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3274341
· OA: W2899475854
This paper reports on the changes in the monetary ecology around loan payments by auto rickshaw drivers shortly after the introduction of a mobile app in Karnataka, India. A for-profit, social enterprise facilitates loans for purchasing auto rickshaws. The mobile app was designed and implemented to provide accurate, timely loan information for drivers, to support the collaborative work of loan collection payment, and streamline the workflows of the organization. In this paper, we report on the initial experiences with the app, and argue that its introduction led to a tighter coupling of the actors involved and moved control to the back office, which especially impacted the pre- and at-transaction interactions of the monetary ecology. The paper reflects on how these changes impact adoption and use of the app and suggests a number of changes to the design which might address the observed problematics.
