I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought lately to the concept of trust in business. Not so long ago if you went to town to buy a cow, you went from seller to seller, looked them in the eye, talked a bit. If your gut told you something was a bit off you’d walk on to the next seller. Eventually you’d settle on a cow, a seller and a price – maybe a couple of nice chickens or your firstborn – and shake hands on the deal. That thing with the gut was called trust.

Fast forward a few years and we started exchanging little discs of metal for our goods and services, removing ourselves from the actual things we were trading. Then came companies and stock markets. It’s pretty safe to say the whole trust part of the transaction got pretty strained for awhile there.

Now here we are in the 21^st century: paying for goods and services with pieces of plastic that represent the amount of little shiny discs a bank is willing to lend you. We buy books from Amazon, music from iTunes and everything else on eBay – all without once speaking to another human being. We entrust our identities and finances to brands; PayPal has our credit cards, Google our email and Facebook our personal information. No eye contact, no handshake – it’s a bit flaky sometimes but we still trust.

So what does this have to do with design? Actually, as it turns out, quite a bit.