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Making Sense of Blockchain Applications: A Typology for HCI

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    8489 pages
    ISBN:9781450356206
    DOI:10.1145/3173574
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

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    Published: 21 April 2018

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    1. bitcoin
    2. blockchain
    3. distributed ledger technology
    4. identity
    5. trust
    6. typology

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