The present study explores the use of interactions for a communicative purpose, when it comes to communicate banking brand values through a website. By establishing important banking values, trust, sincerity and transparency this study investigates how interaction can be used to communicate those values, through the theory of interaction attributes. Using interaction attributes to communicate emotions as well as brand values has been previously investigated. However, not in the setting of banking. Through designing and exploring interactions this study established some important qualities to consider when designing for banking, with the goal of communicating trust, sincerity and transparency. Attributes consistency, expectedness and apparent are favourable, whilst pliability is found to have a negative effect. In addition to these attributes established by previous work, the findings suggest the importance of a new quality, to design interactions that animate slowly over time, as a way to guide the user through the interaction.

In this thesis the idea of relationship-centered design is proposed based on a speculative design project which is grounded in an understanding of post-anthropocentrism. To facilitate post-anthropocentric human-artifact relationships, that don’t favor living actors over non-living actor, objects may appear to have a life-like agency based on needs and therefore must be empathized with which can be achieved through object characters. Through the discussion of materiality, object behaviors, and object characters, the philosophy of object-oriented ontology and the social-theory of actor-network theory are connected to concepts from interaction design and reveal that materiality, object characters, and object behaviors “meet” in the interaction of humans and artifacts. The phenomenological approach of the Research through Design methodology has shown how the applied methods, that were focussed on the perceived experience of the designer, helped to identify possible correlations of materiality, object behavior and object characters that might affect the human-artifact relationship. Further, the research identified possible implications of post-anthropocentric design, which suggests, that further investigation of how post-anthropocentrism as an approach to design might influence aspects as understandings of equality, consent, and consumption behavior which eventually might have an influence on socio-political structures.