Strengthen Relationships between and within Chinese"1+2" Families
by Virtual Gift Money Exchanging, Managing and Spending
· Why Focus on Gift Money
· What Group to Target
· Design Goal & Mantra
· Concepts & Scenarios
· Three Key Issues for Virtual Home Design
· Future Work
1: Spring Festival | 2: Prepare Red Envelope
3: 2006, Giving Gift Money | 4: 1984, Giving Gift Money
Why Focus on Gift Money
Gift money is rich in non-economic meanings, including: conveying and expressing love, building and enhancing inter-family relationship, blessing the gods mentally, supporting friends and relatives economically in a hidden way, etc. Gift money phenomenon also covers a wide range of financial practices, including: presenting, receiving, returning, spending, and investing. More important, every practice involves all family members participating collectively and interactively. In addition, it involves the participants from grandparents, parents to children, and different core families under the same family tree; also from relatives to friends, with different relationships, so the dynamics is complex.
The second reason: gift money custom has been remediated by cultural and socioeconomic trends along with the axis of time. E.g. a growing number of "Only One Child"s have constructed families and had kids. This generation does not live within a local circle, like their parents’ having all the social relationships in one city, or even one district, or one street. On the contrary, they have friends and relatives spreading over the country or the world, even extending beyond physical world to online world. Thus, the traditional door-to-door "Happy New Year" visits do not work. Another trend change is: children are more willing to get involved into the financial planning than ever before and family members are more independent and the family is more democratic than before. However, the artifacts and the mechanisms to support the custom have not been refashioned yet. Thus, opportunities to this untapped area are hidden here.
Thirdly, China could be regarded as the emerging market for digital money which originated from western culture, but only by localizing the immigrated “digital money”, making it well fit to Chinese culture, and better grow from Chinese own cultural root, could this potential be developed.
How to base on Chinese ways of living, and make the new medium with new technology fit to this culture? Given that gift money is a custom deeply rooted in Chinese culture and people's mind, I want to borrow the unique meaning of Gift Money to look for new ways localizing “digital money”.
Last, but not least, in consideration of my time budget, it's more reasonable to choose a familiar culture with firsthand experience and resources to access for research.
What Group to Target?
I focus on the China urban "1+2"(one child, two incomes) family. Parents born in 1970-80s,mobile, global, having above average salary, education, life standard, passion and literacy in information technology.
Who are they, generally?
· From the graph above illustrated, we could see their history background, the value of this generation and their family trees.
· According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Chinese population in 2010 for this generation, aging between 30 -40, achieves the peak.
· They are technology early adopters, compared with others, with cell phone, computer and internet. Although with regard to electronic transaction, only a small part of them are using it frequently in urban area nowadays. Most are stick to traditional paper money.
· This "1+2" family is more democratic, and the kid is more independent, every member has equality expressing their opinions.
How do these people think about gift money? From the remote interviews, the newspapers, my own experience and the forums with related topics, I got those insights:
· Parents want their children to get Gift Money not for the sake of Money, but they want their children to be cared and loved by others. They don't want their children to be hurt when getting less than other children.
· Families appreciate the Gift Money since that's the symbol of popularity and sociability.
· Child, in some cases, could be seen as the excuse and the medium for Gift Money flowing between families.
· The amount of gift money is growing along with the increasing incomes of common 3-person families in urban China.
· Unlike before, parents allow children to participate in deciding how to use the money. e.g. a 7 years old kid got 30000 yuan gift money, and he discussed with his parents and finally decided to put half to the stock market and half to fund market for investment.
· These young parents think gift money belongs to their children and they feel it is even more complex to figure out the best way of using this money than dealing with their own incomes. So they go to the internet forum seeking for help.
· For children, gift money is almost the first chance participating in financial managing and planning. And it happens every new year. So it will shape how they deal with money, no matter digital or physical, in the future.
Design Goal & Mantra
With the transformation of the socioeconomic situations, do people still feel comfortable keeping this custom? Is it luxurious now for these young "1+2" families?
-- They are no longer living their entire life in only one place, with relatives and friends in the same place. On the contrary, due to different reasons: study, work, immigration, marriage and travel, they spread all over the country, and even the world, far away from their uncles, parents, friends from kindergartens, former mentors, or colleagues. These people are willing to use technology for communication. e.g. 3 out of 6 cousins of mine are abroad, respectively in US, France as well as Malaysia this spring festival, and we keep touch with each other and with our big family online.
--Even though living or happening to be in the same place during the festival, many people still feel comfortable managing their social activities since they have been used to doing so.
As a result, door-to-door Happy New Year tour and gift money exchanging as before turn out to be luxurious for these people.
Could we stop exchanging gift money due to those changes in living mode?
-- No, it has been rooted in Chinese people's lives. One woman I interviewed said she will feel something important missing if she did not send gift money out. One young mother said her daughter has not received money from her uncles this year, and that made her feel her daughter was ignored and did not get the love she deserved. Actually, gift money exchanging during lunar New Year in China is one of the most important and special social activities which only happens once per year and 10-15 times for an entire life, only during the childhood.
Are there any other changes after receiving the gift money within the core family?
--When it comes to large amount of money, these families tend to do financial management collectively. So people also need a platform to for a whole family to interact and collaborate with each other, from the previous activities such as gaming, watching movie, to finical planning and even further, family shopping.
How to help these target people to feel comfortable keeping this custom, as well as making the changes fit their new needs?
-- The solution could be "keep the family custom online virtually" to overcome the difficulties physically.
Design Goal ---- So the essential goal is to build a platform supporting exchanging between families and managing gift money among family members within a family virtually.
Will people buy designer's idea to use technology for that?
--Technology also brought the by-products as sacrificing the emotional meaning, making people feel being ignored, and the relationship is cheap. When people are appreciating the convenience and efficiency of going through the customs such as sending batched wishes through SMS, some people feel the relation is not that close with these friends, and people who sent batched wishes, even sometimes forgot the change the name of the receiver, also feel embarrassed and bad about themselves. In this case, the way how to use technology conflicts with the original goal: to better people, empower people, make people feel they are like who they want to be. Parents have their own model as good parents, so do friends, relatives, etc.
--In addition, in terms of money, electronic transaction is not as simple as sending emails since it’s hard to get them trust the system. Chinese credit record system is almost zero. Real name identity connecting to cell phone, online service, email account, even game, blog and virtual community are hard to be implemented in this culture. Concerns such as "identification card could be faked", " it may only work and may turn to be even more dangerous to honest people using the real identity, and evil people will still do evil and even take use of these identity information to do evil" are shown from an online survey conducted by China Mobile, who aimed at implementing the cell phone number correlating to the real name identity at the end of 2006. Simply put, people don't trust the electronic transaction.
Design mantra ---- Strengthen Relationships between and within "1+2" Families by Gift Money Exchanging, Managing and Spending Virtually.
Concepts & Scenarios
Three Key Issues for Virtual Home Design
Virtual vs. Physical, Feeling vs. Doing, and Trustiness vs. Privacy.
Virtual vs. Physical
Virtual home is mapped from physical home, with the same family members and same dynamics. So people are still engaging into the real life, and the relationship inside and outside the virtual home (with other families) will not be alienated although it's in virtual world. The benefit for building virtual home is that it extends the physical home, rather than replacing it. It makes door to door online visiting come true. Thus, friends could feel free to send gift money to virtual home to keep the custom. Furthermore, it could build a platform for further online financial planning , managing, online shopping collectively, regarding family as a unit.
Feeling vs. Doing
How to make receivers feel being cared and make the givers feel they play good roles as relatives, friends, etc?
The feeling of being tied closer to each other
Emotionally Enjoyment of the Experience, e.g. bringing surprises, good wills
Feel Warm or Touched, e.g. spending more time and energy, putting your heart to the online visit and gift money presenting
Feel Personal and Special, e.g. not batched e-cards
Feel Close, e.g. face-to-face meeting through webcams or / and phones to see or / and hear and get involved
Trustiness vs. Privacy
Chinese credit system is quite naïve and the more important thing is, Chinese has no credit record history. Also different from western countries, as a student, you may have no official email account since that's not important in people's mind. The real name identity campaign encountered many obstacles. Based on the thoughts embedded in Chinese people's mind, what makes them feel trusty and how much privacy they want to release, to whom they could release, how much, etc, I drafted the graph. As the Chinese old saying goes, "The Temple cannot run, even the monks run away." In this culture which other credit system lagged behind, things related with home, home address, home phones as well as family members and relationships are issues that people tend to trust, even more than the Photo ID. So in order to make people trust the system as well as to extend its functions further as a online family shopping platform, I emphasize on that virtual home is only a map of real home, with its real family members, home address, even phone numbers, and family social networks.
Due to the institutional infrastructure in politics, sociality and economy, Chinese people believe government organizations, such as central bank, china mobile, are more trustworthy than private companies or online service providers, such as Tencent who provided QQ Instant Messager and QQ virtual money, etc. People worry about what if the company is bankrupt; what if government put a new law into effect and banned the online service, so people may suffer the losses themselves. Therefore, I involved government owned bank and mobile bureau in the transaction chain: to exchange between virtual and real money.
Further Work
The online/mobile virtual home system could not only support gift money exchanging, as what I mentioned in “Target Group” section, family members are more and more willing to democratically and collectively managing finance, planning investment, and going shopping.
Once electronic transaction comes, physical home based virtual community could bring more safety, trust and certainty to online virtual world, as well as the experience that family members are tied closely by these financial practices.