Money is changing. Through data-driven innovation, the ways in which money can now be represented, encountered, exchanged, and ultimately designed, is increasingly diverse. However, to our knowledge, there has been little research into how children now experience, interact with, and learn about contemporary, forms of digital money. For example, a child may receive pocket money through an app like Rooster Money, or GoHenry; purchase in-game items with Fortnite ‘V-Bucks’; receive cash in a birthday card; donate or earn a virtual currency ‘Bits’ via live-streaming on Twitch; and even have a pension, or a cryptocurrency wallet managed online. Prior work on children’s interactions with money focuses on financial literacy and capability, through large scale survey methods, and has arguably prioritised parents’ perspectives on money, rather than being child-led (e.g. Money Advice Service, 2018, 2019). This exploratory project, in partnership with Natwest, therefore aimed to undertake fundamental, qualitative and design-led research with children and their families in Scotland, to understand the secret lives of children’s digital monies.

The project set out to:
1. Gather interdisciplinary expert perspectives (in FinTech and child development) of the key questions
and issues around children and digital monies
2. Produce a detailed mapping of the variety of digital monies children encounter day-to-day
3. Foster and study rich expression and dialogue between children and their families around digital money
4. Develop novel design methods to support children’s participation in money research
5. Identify key areas for future research, informing the design, guidance and regulation of children’s
interactions with digital monies.

Our research resulted in an in-depth cultural probe study with families at home, where children played as ‘Money Detectives’ completing ‘Money Missions’ to help us learn about how they saw and experienced money in their day-to-day lives, as well as in-depth expert interviews to map key areas for future research on these topics.