The Economic Value of Human Values is a critical design game that examines how human values become objects of exchange. It contrasts barter and monetary economies to explore the relationship between use value and exchange value, while making visible how different forms of exchange shape negotiation, desire, consumption, and economic behavior. The game was created to raise critical consciousness of design ethics in fields such as social design, design for development, and co-design.
In the first round, players receive three human value cards from Genis Carrera’s Human Values deck and negotiate exchanges until someone accumulates five cards. Without money, exchange depends on reciprocal desires: acquiring something requires offering something that the other person values. Participants experience how barter makes buying and selling inseparable and how negotiation establishes equivalences between otherwise heterogeneous values.
The second round introduces money as an intermediary. Players receive monetary tokens and can establish prices for their cards. Transactions become faster and no longer require reciprocal wants: money enables purchasing without necessarily having something the seller desires. Participants consequently shift from being simultaneously buyers and sellers toward strategies based on purchasing power, accumulation, and even investment.
The game also addresses a broader process: the universalization and commercialization of human values. Carrera’s graphic language echoes the visual language used by the United Nations, particularly in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through their standardized icons, colors, and concise formulations, complex social and ethical aspirations are transformed into universally recognizable units that can circulate across governments, institutions, and organizations.
This visual and conceptual standardization enables human values to enter economic discourse in measurable, communicable forms of social responsibility. Values such as equality, sustainability, health, education, and inclusion can consequently become associated with organizational reputation, branding, investment criteria, and corporate capital. The game places this process alongside the economic exchange of the cards, asking how values that appear universal and intrinsically meaningful can simultaneously become resources within systems of economic exchange.
Design is therefore not merely representing the values in this game and in capitalist societies. Through visual abstraction, categorization, and standardization, it helps make them legible and exchangeable, directly contributing to the commodification of human values while trying to salvage them against financial exchanges, a pulsating contradiction of social design that never resolves.