Many have claimed lately that designers should design services rather than products, to alleviate our increasingly contaminated planet. Some felt that way too back in mid 20th century, when the first credit cards appeared. They began as charge accounts offered by individual stores. The Diner’s Club offered the first credit card that could be used at multiple locations in 1950: issued to only two hundred customers, it was accepted at twenty-seven restaurants in New York City. Today, credit cards such as Visa or MasterCard are networks of financial institutions, and credit card companies are unscrupulous macro empires that base their businesses on building debt in their customers. Few people stop to consider such predatory practices when they rely on the convenience of handing out a piece of plastic to pay for most anything, most anywhere in the world. I have to admit, that is quite a service. The future of this macro-service? In their quest for having customers spend more and more, credit card companies will have to be increasingly creative in their reward offers. Some claim the next big thing will be to reward their customers with gifts of virtual currency such as Second Life’s Linden dollars (in 2006, $100 million worth of transactions flowed through the virtual world of Second Life, and that amount is only increasing). The material future? Perhaps not as ambitious and far more predictable: same shape and size, different materials, such as metal sheet, instead of plastic.
