Digital welfare: designing for more nuanced forms of access

Abstract

The aim of many forms of digitalized welfare is to offer a personalized, holistic service that is affordable, sustainable, efficient, encouraging and leaves room for voluntary action. We argue that for these goals to be achieved, consideration has to be given both to the design of the system delivered by the welfare provider and to the ecosystem that further shapes the experience of the system. In such an ecosystem not only should state-provided welfare be considered but so too should community support, as well as alternative methods of accounting for societal contribution. In this paper, we use theoretical perspectives on access and security to ideate sketches that invoke new user experiences of welfare. These sketches reflect the importance of both designing for and understanding the ecosystem in which welfare systems are accessed, in order to articulate a different welfare ethos that can encompass both complementary and conflicting perspectives. Using the ideas of Buchanan (1992, 2001a) our synthesis of theories related to security with the practical implementation of digital welfare aims to shape the placement (Buchanan 1992) of digital welfare by embedding access points of different types further into the welfare ecosystem.