Where Finance and Design Coincides: Designing Artefacts

The use of design in finance is a topic of interest, as it has the potential to strengthen the financial sector by improving elements, facts, products, services, and the ability to design. In this paper, we draw upon arguments from finance, law, economics, and design domains to examine the role of design in finance and to propose a framework to assess the use of design thinking in the financial sector. Our exploration starts from the premise that design knowledge is developed partially through practice, which implies that design research and knowledge overlap, but as well through a strong academic research foundation. We view finance as a framework for managing funds, encompassing activities such as investing, borrowing, lending, and managing risks. The artificiality of the entire financial system allows for the creation of new financial artifacts, making the adoption of design methods and epistemology in finance appropriate. We suggest that finance can be seen as a design of an exchange system to allow societies to function, but the increasing number of financial products requires expanding the traditional categories used to describe them. Thus, design thinking can be a valuable resource for finance to better respond to changing societal needs in an increasingly individualistic system. Overall, this paper highlights the potential for design to improve the financial sector and proposes a framework to evaluate the use of design thinking in finance.