This week, we’ve made enormous progress on the advertising system. The design is solidifying and we’re getting closer to a complete system. We’ve been working on the game mechanics and balancing the incentives for the various players in our ecosystem. We’ve got a proposal that addresses the concerns of UX, incentives, and technical constraints pretty well.
On the technical side, we updated the transaction payment workflow. Users no longer have to wait at a gas payment window. Instead, transactions are sent behind-the-scenes and can be viewed at the Transactions history screen.
Dev Updates
New features
Transaction history
Backend
Long-lasting Unreviewed Edits now expire
Frontend
Transaction watcher
Issues resolved
Transaction underpriced issue (In Progress)
Transactions dropping (In Progress)
CORs problem
Wrong address shown issue resolved (all customer funds recovered!)
Removed bottlenecks on the backend
Now is the opportunity for advertising design to use the power of design, not just to improve lifestyles but also to practice design in a way that balances social and environmental interests.
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the ‘good old days’), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal-mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are taught carefully to young people.
In an age of mass production when everything must be planned and designed, design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself). This demands high social and moral responsibility from the designer. It also demands greater understanding of the people by those who practise design and more insight into the design process by the public.
via Nimble Design Firms should Do Good | Design Sojourn.
A great place to start is at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Read my post Becoming Rich by Designing for the Poor where I argue that the consumerist model of Western capitalism has proven detrimental even to the developed economies and will spell doom if carried into the so-called emerging markets. Designers wield a power to lead the way by engaging in what Brian has so aptly named “do good” design, a coinage that’s likely to stick.