Towards community-centered support for peer-to-peer service exchange: rethinking the timebanking metaphor

Commercial peer-to-peer service exchange businesses, such as AirBnB, Lyft and TaskRabbit, are expanding rapidly, but their non-profit counterparts are lagging behind. We conducted a field study of the most prominent of these, timebanking; a system in which 'time dollars' are earned and spent by people providing services for and receiving them from each other. Our study exposed problems with the very metaphor of banking itself, which deter participation. In this paper we discuss how these problems can be tackled with user experience design for systems supporting timebanking. Our design ideas emphasize the personal and social benefits of participation, and avoid such unappealing concepts as debt and neediness that the timebanking metaphor falls afoul of.