A New Relationship to Money explores how electronic payments might acquire gestures, rituals and feedback of their own. Beginning with an experiment that stripped a London Oyster card down to its RFID chip and coil, the 2007 project developed devices for different spending behaviors and imagined services layered on bank accounts. It asks how the design of a transaction might change a person’s relationship to money beyond the confirmation of a successful payment.

Removing the card’s plastic casing made its electronic components visible while drawing attention to how little of a transaction is available to the senses. The familiar confirmation beep became a starting point for exploring the relationship between a payment, its perceptible signals and the meaning people attach to them.

The resulting devices and service concepts imagine feedback woven into spending: new gestures, reflexes, rituals and pleasures associated with electronic money. They ask how financial interfaces might shape everyday behavior and make an abstract account balance feel like an extension of the self.