Favors As Currency

What is currency? If you think about it, currency comes in many different forms. And themost interesting forms of currency do not come in paper bills. In every society, we use our relationships as a form of currency. We often hear “you owe me a favor” or “you owe this much to me” amongst friends or people we know.

For example, in the Chinese culture, the word“favor” is called “ren qing”. Directly translated, it’s put together by two words that means “human feelings”. It’s almost like a mental account book in your head of how much other people owe you or you owe other people.

Because of our relation with others, we often find ourselves filling other people’s agendas with favors we owe them. This also has a strong tie with how back doors in different societies or systems operate.

People take advantage of the mental account book in our heads and our feeling of guilt. More than often, we find ourselves pressured into tasks we don’t want to do just because of our relation to others. We will often times be reminded of what others has done for us in the past, even if we never verbally agreed to a deal like this.

For my senior thesis. I wanted to do an exploration on “favors” as a form of currency. With the purpose to give more insight to how it’s put to work and the negative effects favors has on individuals as members of the society.

A system will be set up to demonstrate the inner workings of how favors work, to give my viewers a interactive and personal experience. My thesis project will involve a structure that will allow a form of trade to take place for the viewers to have their own experience. The idea is to convey the lack of balance in favor based relationships and society, in hopes that my viewers will take away awareness of situations that they are put in.

I decided to make an large capsule machine. But first I had to make a prototype for it to make sure it would work. It turns out it works!

To show the in balance, I had requested 25 cents but has put cat food and paperclips and other useless and random objects.

I wanted to use a transaction to show that we don’t usually get what we bargained for in favors, because everyone’s perception is relative when it comes to who has done more or who owes the other person what.

After a long struggle, I made two egg capsule machines.

I stuck a note in each one that says “You look like a nice person, thanks for your donation. I owe you one.” Which means nothing because while they did not get what they bargained for, the favor is also meaningless because I will never be able to get a chance to repay them.

Thinking about user experience, I wanted people to understand the experience if they did not think it through, so instead of handing out pamphlets, I made a receipt machine and printed a role of receipt looking paper that had my thesis on the back.

During the thesis show, I was glad to see many people find interest in it and interact with it. I hope they left the show with a topic they never really gave much thought to.

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