Paralell Realities
UX Research — 12 March 2025 · 9 min read
What designing Indra taught me about building for trust instead of transactions
Abstract
Art allows me to share with the viewer my perspectives about reality and the ways of understanding the world beyond the obvious, observing the relationships of move-ment, shape and behavior, and between apparently unre-lated concepts, to later make them evident with patterns and semantics comparisons between image and sound, as well as games of scale and proportion. For this, digital arts media such as experimental video, object-oriented programming and mapping were used, resulting in inter-active installations, digital illustrations, and experimental videos that allowed problematizing and freely articulating relationships between the social, the biological and virtu-alness.
Trust doesn't scale like inventory
When we mapped reciprocity networks during the Indra research, the structure that emerged looked nothing like a marketplace graph. Exchanges chained: someone repairs a bike, the bike's owner translates a document for a third person, who watches the first person's kids. Value circulated rather than cleared. Nobody was keeping score, but everyone knew the score.
Rating systems break this. The moment you attach a score to a favor, you convert a relationship into a transaction — and transactions, unlike relationships, are comparable, extractable and gameable.
Designing for circulation
The alternative we landed on treats the network itself as the unit of design. Instead of asking "how good is this person?", the interface asks "how healthy is this web?" Reciprocity balance, cluster formation, the emergence of new connectors — these became the visible signals.
This changes incentives quietly but completely. You can't grind a network-health metric the way you grind a personal rating. The only way to improve it is to actually participate.
Infrastructure implies stewardship
Calling something infrastructure is a design commitment: infrastructure is maintained, governed and owned by the people who depend on it. That's why Indra's communities can export or delete their network data — not as a GDPR checkbox, but as the product's core political proposition.
I don't think every product needs this. But every designer working on systems that mediate human relationships should be able to answer: what does my interface convert relationships into? If the answer is "transactions," that's a choice — and there are others.