TRANSACTIONS IN LONDON
DEFAMILIARIZATION AND ETHNOGRAPHY
Defamiliarization is a technique we can use to intentionally disrupt our automatic engagement with familiar systems—preventing our eyes from glazing over—and revealing new insights into the ultra-familiar. By making the familiar seem newly strange, we can surface unique and new design affordances and constraints that typically go unnoticed. These fresh insights can then be leveraged to craft more intuitive, resilient, and human-centered designs, among many other things!
CONTACTLESS: BECOMING CASHLESS
This was an individual project conducted over just about four weeks. The first weeks were preparation: developing a literature review and methodology ahead of a three week stay in London, where I would conduct my fieldwork.
MOTIVATIONS
London, of all cities in the UK, is making the fastest transition to a cashless city: and it’s something that was repeatedly noted to me, as an incoming tourist, to be prepared for (Welsh, 2023).
As many cities, especially those in Europe, transition towards a “cashless” future, I wanted to make the most of my trip and dig into the experience: noting small frictions—confusing signage, split-second hesitation, or a failed tap—of this apparently all-digital system, and breaking down what exactly makes it so “special?”
RQ: IN WHAT WAYS DOES LONDON BEING "CASHLESS" UNIQUELY AFFECT TRANSACTION EXPERIENCE?
GOAL 2:
Compare across key site types (Bus, Tube, Stores) where transactions occur to uncover how contactless is accepted, how it has propagated, and how payment technologies produce different behaviors based on site.
GOAL 1:
Experience for myself both the ease and frictions of contactless transactions in situ—seeing how space, signage, informatics and medium/device could be guiding people’s choices.
PROJECT SECTIONS
LITERATURE REVIEW
My literature review is comprised of a mix of research papers, commercial articles, and news sources. This menagerie of perspectives helped me to build a cohesive picture of the contactless landscape, and some even went as far to help me scope in on a precise methodology.
Together, this illustrates a clear causal chain: TfL’s early rollout of contactless, cashless taps had Londoners expecting—and primed to use—contactless payments beyond the Tube and buses, fueling a shift in stores around the city.
CASE STUDY: SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS IN BRISTOL
Complementing the drive to eliminate commotion and other moments of friction that specifically eat up time, research on digital community currencies in the UK reveals that everyday transactions carry many other social and communal expectations (Perry and Ferreira). These are the very considerations users juggle when choosing where, how, and what to buy.
The Bristol Pound is a local currency launched to strengthen Bristol’s neighborhood economy, accepted at a limited number of cafes, shops and services only within the neighborhood (Perry and Ferreira). Members either exchanged sterling for paper £B notes at specific staffed “cash points” or they set up an electronic account to pay via “Txt2Pay”—with which sending a text with their payment amount and the payee information completes a transaction (Perry and Ferreira). Because acceptance was limited to specific outlets—much like London’s growing cohort of card-only retailers—users were observed scanning shop windows for the Bristol Pound sticker, which would signal support for the currency in a shop as well as a sort of ‘belonging’ of that store to the community (Perry and Ferreira).
Every transaction in the Bristol system unfolded as a small, deliberate interaction, where technical preparation and social cues went hand in hand. Participants described “preparing supporting devices” well before reaching the till—topping up their digital £B accounts, lining up with their phones, maybe memorizing or glancing at the merchant’s Txt2Pay code displayed on the counter—all so that as soon as they stepped up, they could send the text and be on their way (Perry and Ferreira). The behaviors together imply a concern about taking up too much time for others in line behind them, or in other words: a concern about being a commotion for others.
However, transaction experience for these users wasn’t just about time spent in line and being speedy at the till. The Bristol Pound case makes exemplifies how payment is never a purely technical act but a medium for social display, moral expression, and community coordination. For example, when members intentionally pre-allocate a fixed sum of sterling to their £B account each month—effectively “earmarking” these funds as local solidarity capital and ensuring it can’t be siphoned back into mainstream accounts (Perry and Ferreira).
This act of committing resources in advance transforms budgeting into a statement of shared values, signaling to oneself and others that local businesses and neighborhood ties take priority. the conditions built into the system—the inability to convert £B back into sterling without fees—acted as a “forcing function” on behavior, prompting users to monitor balances and make a deliberate choice to put money towards their community. Rather than passive, quick, friction-less transfers, every Txt2Pay text became a social interaction: balance-checking, code-confirming, and maybe even some chit chat with the clerk as one gets their payment squared away.
Crucially, these choreographed behaviors—scanning for acceptance stickers, verifying trader codes aloud with clerks, waiting for the confirmation “ping,” and so forth—show that transactions serve as social platforms: they prompt users to demonstrate reliability, reinforce neighborhood solidarity, and uphold a communal rhythm of courtesy (Perry & Ferreira). Payment interfaces guide these rituals of trust and belonging: meaning user-centered transaction technologies, cashless or otherwise, must balance speed with support for the social roles and relationships that give each tap its real meaning.
Of course, this example being so high-touch, as opposed to the low-touch experience of an all-technical tap-to-pay interaction, raises questions of the unique social experience and impacts of the contactless-cashless city.
PROPAGATION OF CONTACTLESS TRANSACTIONS
Once Londoners were tapping across TfL’s network, cash usage plummeted citywide. By 2023, cash accounted for just 12 percent of UK transactions—down from over 50 percent a decade earlier—hitting a record low (Milliken, 2024). This raised concerns, with critics warning that over 10 million Londoners would struggle in a fully cashless retail landscape—be it through losing direct control of their budgets or risking unnecessary debts (Hickey, 2023).
As explained by the Treasury Committee—a cross-party committee of Members of Parliament—the proliferation of card-only outlets and stores could impose a “poverty premium”: relegating cash users to stores with higher prices for essentials and few other options accepting cash transactions (Peachey, 2025). This would leave behind vulnerable populations who depend on cash, penalizing them for their lack of access to contactless technologies. This is not a stagnant concern—there’s now even a campaign by the Payment Choice Alliance, which decries the refusal of stores in London to accept legal cash as “completely unacceptable” and points to a poll showing 71% percent of British adults support the idea of a legal requirement for businesses to honor coins and notes (Ungoed-Thomas, 2025).
GO CONTACTLESS: SAVE TIME.
Contactless payments are as a deliberate design intervention which collapses the multi-step rituals of cash and PIN based transactions into a single, sub-second tap. The speed of a transaction is central to the design of contactless technologies in tap-to-pay scenarios. In the specific case of London, this emphasis on time was echoed in Transport for London’s intended requirement that each transaction ideally “need[s] to be limited to less than half a second” to maintain the flow of their queues in buses and tube stations (Verma, 2017).
TRANSACTIONS ARE SOCIAL
In a user-experience lens, this laser-focus on time can be bridged to a deeper social imperative: because every transaction is engineered to be swift, people internalize the need to avoid causing any unwanted delay at the till. This isn’t unique to contactless transactions; in fact, the desire to avoid becoming the source of commotion is central to the payment experience.
In Japan, such a commotion or public annoyance has its own word: “Meiwaku”- a moral and social nuisance that risks shame or bothering others (Mainwaring, March, & Maurer, 2008). While the average transaction in Japan comes with its own culturally informed expectations that wouldn’t carry over to the UK—especially around being seen using credit cards—ethnographic research from Tokyo shows that any incidents of meiwaku are to be avoided at all costs, and discusses how technologies not designed with respect to this culturally informed value wouldn’t be adopted by Japanese users (Mainwaring, March, & Maurer, 2008). A comparable norm exists in London: just as Tube etiquette guides advise commuters to have their bank card or Oyster at the ready before reaching the barriers and to avoid fumbling through pockets when at the front of the queue—Londoners are similarly concerned with time spent and wasted by others in line, and look for streamlined transaction experiences (Praagh). Above all, ‘Time’ seems to be a universally central component of tap-to-pay user experience.
UBIQUITY OF CONTACTLESS
In 2012, Transport for London rolled out contactless technologies on its buses with the goal of minimizing boarding delays and keeping gate throughput high (Verma, 2017). By 2014, contactless had rolled out to the entire Tube system, including the DLR and London Overground network, having seen successful results on the bus lines. In the first year that buses afforded pay-as-you-go transactions, cash accounted for just 1 percent of bus journeys—around 60,000 trips—demonstrating a quick shift to tapping on instead of paying with cash (Pritchard, Vines, & Olivier, 2015; Transport for London, 2022). (Interestingly, they found that of those paying with cash, 86% also held an oyster card!)
By embedding tap to pay as the ‘default’ fare payment mechanism, Transport for London primed and habituated all of the Londoners and tourists who use public transport to use contactless payments over cash.
GOING “ALL DIGITAL”
Digital payments, while making the interaction faster, also have the secondary affect of leaving little room for reflection. Digital payment technologies by nature strip away the materiality of money, turning each purchase into an imperceptible data update. The affects of this are predictable: In a survey of 120 higher-education students, 68 percent admitted they spent more once they switched to digital methods—often on non-essential items like snacks or entertainment—and 60 percent said they used mobile wallets primarily for such impulse buys (Yadav). Only 30 percent actively monitored their balances in real time, with the majority discovering budget overruns only when their accounts ran dry (Yadav).
Building on the loss of material presence, digital payments also collapse the temporality of spending into a single, fleeting moment—erasing the seconds in which cash once lingered at the point of exchange.
METHODOLOGY
I plan to conduct fieldwork at several key locations, which I selected based on notable sites in my lit review, and the accessibility and safety of myself as an ethnographer.
As established in the literature review - the transit system in London is largely credited with gearing Londoners with the familiarity and physical technology needed to engage with a contactless tap-to-pay system. The bus system, as a site for one of the papers itself, also became a main point of focus for contactless transactions. The underground was an obvious addition, considering it is more popularly used and an Icon of the city itself.
It was from there that I decided to look into Cafes and Coffee shops. These are locations where I wouldn’t be out of place loitering around, and which usually have an open design: with tables near or in sight of the till!
The last fieldwork “site” was comprised of any location where I myself engaged with or observed a transaction of note. This was all captured in my Fieldwork Journal! Any time I saw a notable, special, or otherwise odd interaction in a ‘transaction space’, I would take note. Sometimes, even anecdotes from my classmates would make the cut!
ANTICIPATING SAFTEY, PRIVACY AND WILLINGNESS
Seeing as paying and transactions themselves are a sensitive interaction, where people go out of their way to buy RFID safe wallets, and use their bodies to cover their pins, I wanted to be certain I could be unobtrusive in my observations of Londoner’s transaction experiences. In the initial stages in the project, I didn’t anticipate being able to get interviews. All of my fieldwork centered around observing from the outside, and making sure I as an outsider and researcher in the field wouldn’t end up putting myself in danger.
Before setting out, I also explored the laws surrounding photography of other people in London, and found that because I am not acting for a commercial purpose, and taking photos in public spaces, I should generally be okay. I planned from the beginning to be especially sensitive in the underground and bus stations, seeing as they are separately highlighted as under specific restrictions.
SITE SELECTION
A smaller constraint to consider was that of this being a school trip in a foreign country. We were asked to move in a buddy system, and not go explore the city alone. My sites—transport hubs I’ll already be using, coffee shops, and so on—all of which being busy, social, and easily accessible made them attractive locations for fieldwork where I’d always easily have another person tagging along. Even better, in cafes I could bring along groups to study and work as I conducted fieldwork!
To the left is a map of a handful of notable fieldwork sites.
At each site, I spent time hovering nearby to a checkout, till, or turnstile, as appropriate, observing the behaviors and actions of other customers. I took notes on my phone or available notebooks, and took photos when appropriate.
SOME notable fieldwork sites: Kings Cross and Russel Square stations, Camden Market Coffee shops, and Covent Garden stores.
DATA ANALYSIS
Taking my observations, photos, and notes, I clustered them into like-groups. The interactions, informatics, and points of friction I had experienced and observed became storypoints, which together revealed or emphasized unique qualities of the transaction experience in a contactless, ‘cashless’ city. That is to say: I used each of my datapoints as a means to unearth and exemplify specific qualities of a transaction which I found notable. These notable qualities worked out into four larger themes, aligning with the literature review:
TIME, which users internalize not wasting time as a social courtesy, and is the implicit central focus of a modern contactless transaction.
SOCIAL, where users connect with others based on where and how they spend their money, or technologies afford or change how users and stores/sellers interact and engage in the community.
COGNITIVE LOAD, which concerns the amount of mental gymnastics and awareness of their payment methods a user must have before, during, and after a transaction. does this store accept my payment method? Do I have enough money? Where do I check out? Did my payment go through?
TEMPORARILY OF MONEY, which coincides with cognitive load from a design standpoint, exploring the awareness and immateriality of money as felt by a user spending it through various technical and analog means.
STORES:
Self Checkout is almost ALWAYS an option
As an American, even checkout with an employee is less personable than expected. There is not much small talk/conversation happening if at all.
Generally, being up at the counter felt identical to the US transaction experience
BUSES:
FELT the busiest, most consistently.
Unlike other sites, visiting the bus routes often meant seeing the same crowds of people. Small platoons of people who load into the bus together with lots of familiar faces.
Card readers sometimes taped over, or jerry-rigged in some way which covered the indicator light.
Sometimes, people would get on and not tap, showing their card to the bus driver (Usually the elderly).
People can get on and not immediately taP: standing out of the way against the wheel well and digging through their bags for a card. Bus driver did not comment to them, and in one case closed the door and made it to the next stop before a person did their inital tap.
People got out their cards while in line at the doors, almost every time.'
Most unpredictable: sometimes bus drivers would reroute, or be directed to other roads, causing changes in experience…
Highlights from my fieldwork journal, with an emphasis on stories about failures and points of friction.
The final data worked out to be a collection of short stories and comments: informal interviews I had with kind strangers, all of whom were Londoners, my fieldwork journal and reflections, and photos, videos, and descriptions of moments of friction in the system. Below are a few notable, self-explanatory notes, alongside reflections about the sites as a whole.
STORES:
Of the sites, the most visibly informated. Busses and tubes were uniform across the city, so their signs were cookie cutter. Usually, there was a sign indicating if the store did not accept cash. If the store accepted cash, then there were no signs at all about payment methods.
The vintage market pop-up was an experience in that many stands did not disclose their payment methods: some stands were cash only, making them completely inaccessible to us. Other, bigger stands and more established sellers had handheld card readers.
TUBE
(Very few pictures for privacy concerns. Theres always an employee nearby, and the “vibe” of the tube is to mind your own business & keep out of others’ way.)
of all the sites, the most consistent and streamlined experience. At most I waited in line for maybe 2 minutes to get through the barriers. There seems to always be an open barrier available.
In the tube, you really only need to look in ONE place: at the turnstile. Everything else is irrelevant to your experience, and its nice that its centralized.
Interesting behavior where despite many turnstiles being open, sometimes an individual will follow another into the exact same turnstile, in picture to left the woman with yellow pants is one such leader, where she was struggling to tap through and the WHOLE time, the young lady in gray behind her (not associated with her) waited rather than find another turnstile.
People prepare their phone/card FAR before they are at the barrier. I observed many people who would pull it out in the 10 feet before, and others who walked in the door with a card out.
MANY people immediately put the card back, still actively walking, as soon as they get past the turnstile.
While my qualitative tallies are not reliable, PHONES are the least popular option.
Highlights from informal interviews (2-3 minute short conversations). I always prioritized asking what their preferred medium of payment was (Cash, Card, Phone), and why, after explaining I was studying London as a “cashless city”.
FIELDWORK OVERVIEW
As mentioned earlier, I hadn’t anticipated being able to get a lot of interviews considering the sensitive nature of transactions, and my own role as a foreign interloper. Much of my earliest fieldwork consisted of sketches of the layout of coffee shops, how the queues were organized, and informatics such as “we’re cashless” signs. I would also sit nearby and observe transactions, tallying the modes of payment used, and tracking how long quantitatively people were in line.
Around midway through the fiedwork, I attempted to conduct some early analysis. I found that it wasn’t very worthwhile to tally and track numbers: the most poignant and telling data points were anecdotes, reflections on my experiences in transactions, and my own direct observations. Further, across sites, there didn’t seem to be much of a quantitative difference in payment mode (card, phone, or cash), at least on a scale I could effectively capture. After this first attempt, I fine tuned my fieldwork approach, and dedicated myself to observing and note taking.
Below, I have an example of how I “analyzed” videos: by taking stills of every few seconds, I landmarked individual incidents by creating a new line of still shots, screenshotting frames in the original video. One video resulted in a near comic-book story of how these individuals navigated the tube, as well as a tally of ALL visible transactions that occured. While this method resulted in a much more accurate observation of the 2-3 minutes I was recording, the stories I pulled from these videos didn’t illustrate much more than my in-the-moment observations. Much of this project was experimenting with how to document all that I was seeing. The biggest challenge was certainly determining what in the moment was noteworthy.
This set of designs is called the “cardless universe”, where we dont tap or pay through cash. Instead, everyone clicks a counter button for every dollar they spend. You can see here theres a line of people clicking their counters at the payment counter, and another man in a restaurant clicking as he peruses the menu. This design was inspired by both the theme of cognitive load and temporality , as well as generally tries to address a ‘cashless’ society where we still feel the weight of each transaction. Alternatives to this cardless city idea include retinal scans, facial recognition, and voice recognition: all of which felt particularly dystopian in comparison (and showed interesting plays on “privacy”, which is another theme that I didn’t explore in much depth!)
This, uniquely, is the kind of design which could be transplanted anywhere in the wold, as it touches on the universal experience of digital money, addressing a bigger scope than just “cashless cities”. I feel an American audience would interact and react to this technology just the same as any Londoner.
DESIGN SKETCHES
To further clarify and explore these themes, the next step of the process was to take the data analysis into sketching and ideation. These sketches are interventions made to exemplify qualities of the London transaction experience that otherwise would go unnoticed.
My themes became my stepping stones for design: I thought about ways to play with the social implications, the cognitive implications, and so on, incorporating the findings from the lit review with the data from my fieldwork.
For example, this early design to the left is a series of three sketches which I imagined would feed into a larger “movement” encouraging people to be more social and make use of the time saved by using tap to pay at the till by making connections. I especially wanted to call to the unique design of posters seen in the Transport museum, the visuals of which are iconically LONDON at their core. In that very small way, this design is unique to the city, however, at large, this idea is one that could be easily transposed to any city.
This design was inspiried by the idea that London became cashless because the entire population was already adapted to it as a result of the transport system. I wanted to incorporate the turnstile into other transactions, outside of the underground. It is also partly inspired by a presentation from Steffen Reymann, the Manager of the Innovation Center at Cubic, discussing the future of transportation, this design is playing with the idea transactions centering on "tokens". as users enter the underground, in Reymann's design future, their faces are recognized by the cameras, and projected lights indicate if they've succesfully paid or not. Sketches to the right show a play on this design, using tokens attached physically to a user’s shoes. Pictures here shows screenshots of original designs from the presentation by Reymann in the Transport museum. This design is so tightly informed by the tube and underground system that I don’t see it ever being relevant to another city.
Similarly, this second set of sketches is exploring the idea of "belonging" in a space. In many stores around London, you are not to be taking up space within a store if you're not a patron. I as an American visitor felt very keenly—its not ‘enforced’, per se, but the ‘availability’ of a space payment-wise was something that was consistently apparent in my time around the city. Sketch 2 is specifically is inspiried by Reymanns proposed design future and my own experience in a Primark. When checking out, customers became 'trapped' inside a check-out turnstile, where the only exit was blocked by a receipt scanner. To displace this focus on paying for the right to exist in a space, I instead wondered about a world where we entered and paid as we walked in, tapping our cards to open the doors, and scanning a receipt to exit later. The idealized result is a store with “no tills, no bills”, wherein money is no longer a central part of the experience: you’ve left it at the door!
I dont think this is a design which would translate to the US, at least not in my lived experience of Colorado. Perhaps in a more high-density area, like another big city, it would be adopted. Part of why this proposed sketch would be 'successful' is the familiarity of the specific turnstile barriers used in the tube system, and this cultural expectation that patrons are those who get to take advantage of a store's space.
This early sketch shows an interaction where causing a commotion at the barrier causes a user to be instantly removed from the queue — via trapdoor. This was inspired by a time where I got “stuck” (really, I could’ve walked to another turnstile!) behind a woman who couldn’t get through the turnstile. It instantly caused a traffic jam, with people lining up behind us, to my frustration. This was a somewhat common incident, as in the underground whenever someone couldn’t tap, the barrier walls and the line behind them meant they were stuck standing in the way of everyone else.
CONCLUSION
Through this ethnography, London’s tap-to-pay infrastructure emerges not merely as a convenience tool but as a socio-technical ecosystem forged by Transport for London’s early, city-wide adoption. In this setting, every tap becomes a social performance: users prep Oyster cards or mobile wallets in advance and execute near-instantaneous payments to uphold a tacit civic courtesy and maintain the city’s collective rhythm. Yet that veneer of ease masks substantial cognitive work—navigating multiple payment options, app interfaces, and balance checks—so that the true effort of spending shifts from the palm of your hand into the mind. As physical money fades, the small pause once granted by coins and notes disappears, collapsing complex value judgments into momentary data entries and encouraging more impulsive purchases. In answering the central research question, we see that London’s cashless turn orchestrates a choreography of culturally informed social norms, mental labor, and temporal compression that in small ways reshapes how people experience trust, value, and community in every transaction.