• Decipher complex financial concepts visually for everyone to understand;

• Point out the specific values of design and how designers can actually help create complex systems beyond the current definition of artifacts design.

government bailout? How is it possible that no experts can predict the global scale of damage that will ultimately unravel? Has anyone ever asked whether current businesses or financial and political systems have been designed properly?

Our inquisitive design minds inspired us to investigate what has actually taken place to cause this domino effect. Granted, we are not financial experts; we are designers who strive to make complex things easy to under-

stand. In the end, isn’t design all about KISS (keep it simple, stupid)? Indeed, it is our responsibility to design products and systems for consumers that are easy to use and simple to understand. So, if a significant percentage of the general public cannot fully comprehend how we find ourselves in the midst of financial devastation, it must be just pure bad design or communication from the source—Wall Street.

The goal for this article is twofold:

The Big Picture of the
Financial Crisis

One of the first things we learn in design school is to ask the right questions. As educational pioneer John Dewey once said, “A problem well defined is half solved.” If you don’t ask the right questions, you’ll be solving the wrong problems.

So, first we must ask some fundamental questions:

• Why should credit cards make it possible for cardholders to spend money they don’t have (credit crisis)?

• Why is it possible to receive money from angel investors for a startup business and then sell out the company before even making a profit? (dot-com bust)

• Why was it possible to buy a house with no down payment, free of interest, for a whole year? (subprime-mortgage crisis)

• Why should people who do not comprehend investments be allowed to hold shares of a company that may expose them to huge financial risks?

• Why should it be possible to make more money in the stock market than working hard at your day job?

These problems are hardly new to us. We should have learned from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s and the dot-com bust in the early 2000s. The subprime-mortgage crisis and credit crunch of today should strike some familiar