Through the Hole in the Wall: ATMs as Strategic Sites for Social Innovation

This design practice-led study, started in 2012, focuses on human experiences of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and how those experiences might be enhanced through new socially and commercially beneficial applications. Established conceptions of ATMs and the ATM network are based on technical and commercial functionality and components. Consideration of ATM users has been largely generic, limited to the duration of the machine interaction. I draw on business, community, academic and criminal examples of ATMs, and comparable devices, being used to meet social and commercial needs to document the ATM’s evolving social impact.

This research project offers a systematic enquiry into how ATMs can be employed strategically for delivering social, as well as commercial, gains such as social inclusion, supporting local communities and ATM fraud-reduction, where ATMs are instrumental in theft of data or money. The design-led process has produced communicable new knowledge in the form of a framework for generating new service design proposals for ATMs and other networked devices. Some specific service design proposals were generated thereby. It produced an original collaborative design method I call generative coscripting, used here to analyse ATM fraud events. Further original contributions include the development and use of the coscripting framework as a co-creative design tool and a design ethnographic study of ATM uses.

Resources for addressing social problems are stretched; banking is beset by scandals, market shocks and digital disruption. Evaluating how the UK’s current 50,000 ATMs could be commercial and social assets is therefore timely. This research explored ATMs as a co-constructed platform, encouraging ATM owners to follow other businesses in building trust and resilience by sharing environmental authorship. The people and artefacts contributing to and impacted by ATM interactions form an interdependent “ecosystem”. Through design practice-led research this ecosystem is explored, proposals for coherent, socially attuned services are assembled, and the generative coscripting approach is systematised for use by others.