Identity, redesigned

What will “identity” mean 25 years from now, and how can we get ready for that future? How can we guarantee privacy and equality, while using ID data for smart public services? How could faster identity detection improve citizens’ life? How will citizens carry IDs and personal information in an unobtrusive manner? We worked with a governmental innovation department in charge of designing the IDs and Passports of the future.

Identity is an extremely delicate topic. Public registries across various public authorities carry significant amounts of data about every single citizen. The access, use, and interpolation of such data carries enormous opportunities and even larger risks for citizens and societies.

Together with the innovation department of a governmental office, in charge of innovation in the field of Identity and Documents for both individual citizens and registered organisations, we ran a Future Design track to reflect on the threats and opportunities that will arise in the identity field. We paid particular attention to the integration of new technologies to make identification as easy as possible, while maintaining the highest security and privacy standards.

The topic of identity and privacy is of particularly high importance at the moment — with private tech companies, on one side, being found to detain and aggressively use pervasive amounts of information about their users, and the regulatory pushback, on the other, which found their shape in the GDPR regulation and in the recent AI Act.

The 6-step Future Design Track we developed to research, ideate, and prototype desirable futures for passports and national IDs.

We designed a 6-step Future Design track, as follows:

The Now
Understanding the Status Quo: what are the current largest challenges, users’ and suppliers’ pain points, internal and external initiatives of the client?
The Past
Down memory lane. What’s the history of ID, passports, identity, personal data, and privacy, in the last 100 years? How did we arrive where we are now, which challenges did we overcome, and which risks did we avoid?
Future Signals
Back to the future. Signals are early-stage emergent behaviours, technologies, or policy proposals, that can give us a hint of possible futures.

An extract from the research phase.

Future Concepts
Interpolating various signals and scenarios, we can create conceptual frameworks for the future, self-standing concepts that can give a sense of potential paradigms.

An extract from the ideation phase.

Concepts prioritisation
Through testing and expert interviews, some paradigms and concepts may be prioritised over others.
Future roadmapping
Moving forward. While some future paradigms are not ready yet to unfold, other futures may already require us to take action today, either in the form of policies, infrastructures, public discourse, or more.