January to May 2021
Hyping financial responsibility through policy design
Interaction Design Master final project, mentored by Josina Vink
Collaboration with the Estonian Social Insurance Board
The (re)brief

The process, based on a collaboration with the Estonian Social Insurance Board started around a very specific task: the redesign of a pension calculator.
Driven by the goal of (trying to) achieve long-term change I took myself out of this narrow brief and analyzed the context and possible future scenarios.
The Estonian pension system is not doing well already. Additionally, as a consequence of a rapidly ageing society, the state-issued retirement pension will become smaller and smaller. The citizen needs, then, to be aware and act early to reach financial well-being on its own.
I centered around this issue the vision of my project:
instead of just becoming useless,

How can the pension system be designed,
to better support the financial freedom of the citizens
throughout all of their life?
or you can go back to the main page
How I proposed a pension policy re-design
to promote independent financial responsibility
and create a natural hype around it in Estonia
(considering citizens' and providers' needs).

Which activities brought me there ->


The research

With this new framework I moved to the research, which involved 9 experts/public sector professionals and 11 citizens.
With the second group in particular I had to get creative;
both in finding the interviewees,
and in structuring the talks (here I found a simple and cool solution).
I additionally carried out research on papers, existing and analogous projects, and digital etnography on groups of discussion on social medias.
Inspiration

Think about when you took your driving license: it was probably around the age of 18. Why? Because the law, by putting limitations, created a universal moment to take care of it. All of your friends are talking about it, your parents discuss it with you, you were maybe envious of older students from your high school who could already drive. The consequence of regulations, which had the goal of ensuring the safety of the streets, is to create expectations, attention, engagement around starting to drive, which has become a modern
rite of passage.
The idea of using limitations as the key to create a universal life-moment, borrowed by the driving license life-event, has become the fundamental first brick of my idea.
The insights
The research highlighted several insights and useful behaviour. Looking for a pattern in my notes, I instead got curious about the missing of one I was hoping to see: there is no universal moment in life to think about long term plans, opportunity and desires, financial stability.
Picture from the first driving class I gave my little sister.
I felt I had the right fish on the hook while organizing my insights around the "life event" topic; I noticed it complemented issues expressed by the providers. My talks with professionals (Customer Service, Consultants form the pension system, and private Consultants) , and by witnessing their efforts to communicate with the citizens, I saw the difficulty into involving the citizens in a moment where they are interested and sensitive to the topic:
“I will have time (in the future) to think about the financial stuff”;
“I’m not sure why I stopped investing, I know I should start again”;
“I just don’t think about it now”.
These insights informed the question
upon which my ideation and design process is based:
Ideation

I ideated starting from all the pieces of my research. Of all the possible direction and concepts I came up with, I decided to focus on something that would propose big picture change, empower following innovation, and would show a different angle from the existing practices and efforts.
Human & Service centered pension reform
To create a universal life moment to think about the long term and ones financial stability, I used tools of law-making: taxes, limitations, rules.
In particular I used the so called second pillar of the pension system:
an investment fund where the state collect 6% per month of the citizen wage, to slowly grow over the years, to be given back after they reach the age of retirement.
1. It is allowed to collect the money
from the second pillar fund
only during the citizen’s 25, 40, 55 birthday years.
Thus creating a life moment where, thanks to this opportunity and limit, the citizen will think, study, talk what concern their long term financial well-being.
Those birthdays become:
Special;
Universal, no matter how ones life-path is;
A way to make long term investment more tangible;
3. During those birthday years,
the citizen can receive money on its investment fund from any person or company,
with full tax refund for the sender, for a total maximum of 6.000€.
How can we create a meaningful, universal life-event
to actively start dealing with financial responsibility?

That's why I decided to propose a
2. During those birthdays years,
free consultations and seminars are offered to the citizen:
on the topic of pension services, investment and finance, saving methods.
Freedom without support, information, help, becomes a burden for the citizen.
Having 3 defined groups of citizen each year allows public providers to offer services, tailored for the needs on those moments in life, when the environment around each of them is already pushing to take care of this topics.
To design my law, I didn't just write it down; I defined the proposal in a back and forth between policy and service concepts, to empower and inform each other in a back and forth. In this way, the law takes into consideration its application in the real world, and the services can be more effective.
I designed low-fi service artifacts, useful both for my own process, and to later discuss my idea with users through a more tangible common ground.
The best example of this informed the third piece of my proposal:
Francesco's Human & Service centered pension reform proposal
I decided to extende the tax refund incentives, already active when the citizen collects money on its own pension fund, and extend it to the network around each person.
This network, during the interviews, emerged to be fundamental in help with the understanding, acting, and with the motivation. With my proposal, it can support the individual with something more than word, by helping to move the first steps and kickstart the investment fund.
Conclusion

I challenged myself with a complex problem in a complex context.
I acknowledged the big picture and tried my best to frame my work in a path that brings to a better future.
I designed starting from the needs, struggles and desires of all the humans involved, citizens and service providers.
I investigated those needs through different research methods.
I looked for innovation inspiration in other fields.
I designed the pieces and the whole on parallel.
I sketched, prototyped, visualized, made tangible my proposal so that it could be tested and its possible consequences perceived.
I revised my concepts based on the feedback from experts, citizens, mentors, colleagues.

I am proud of my work, despite its limits. I know it's naïve to propose a law without considering politics, and knowing that the only way to validate it would be through careful and big-scale testing with citizens, to observe the consequence on their behaviors and actions.
The final success of an idea like mine would depend on the development and implementation of it, into the details: the quality and diffusion of the services, the involvement of public and private institutions such as the education system, and so on. All of the pieces of the puzzle bring to a working togheter could bring to a cultural shift needed for a bigger portion of the population to become financially responsible and independent.

Between all of the efforts I had to endure during this project (interviews in a foreign country during COVID, understand laws, involve professionals, visualize the structure of the pension system public sector, visualize the galaxy of options regarding each citizen's financial life...) one of the hardest tasks has been to synthesize 5 months of work in this page.

Overall, I believe it's a good example of how a designer can get involved in policy-making, using its strengths and method: bringing the user and provider perspective together, making things tangible, ideating out-of-the-box, considering future consequences.


I want to thank everyone who helped me: ixd.ma supervisors and mentors, coursemates, friends, and in particular my mentor Josina for constantly challenging me during the whole process.
The "Investment-as-a-gift-account" is a concept made possible by the policy writing itself; it challenges the social norm of never openly asking for money. If it's allowed in the event of a wedding, do you think it could become normal to send the link to a page similar to the one above? How would you feel receiving it from a relative or friend of yours?
“they will want to talk with us only after 60”;
“when they come it's too late to change things”
Last update: July 2021 - all rights reserved
This site was made on Tilda — a website builder that helps to create a website without any code
Create a website