Continuation from post SSI: Digital Identity User Experience
Before designing a single screen of an identity wallet you have to stop and ask a question that sounds almost stupid: what is identity? Not digital identity. Identity. Because if you start from the technology, you end up copying the plastic card into a phone, and that is exactly the mistake.
The point is that identity is a word that covers at least three different things, and we mix them all the time.
Self identity
How you see yourself. Your values, what you believe, what you like, how you decide to show up in the world. It is the only one that references itself instead of the perspective of others, and maybe for that reason the most important one, even if it is in a constant back and forth with the rest. How you see yourself, and how you purposely decide to appear to others, drives most of your daily actions and the conversation you keep having in your own head.
Online it shows up in something as simple as building your Twitter profile. The photo you pick, the bio, the things you leave out. Nobody validates it. You just declare it.
Social identity
How you see yourself in relation to others, and the groups you belong to. Your family, your city, your profession, the scene you go out in, your culture, your age. Here identity stops being only yours. It gets built with the people around you, and it is also where the conflict lives, because belonging to one group sometimes means being pushed out of another.
Identification
And then there is the boring one, the one institutions care about: how a society recognizes you. Passport, ID card, driving licence, a fingerprint, your face at the airport gate. Identification is not who you are. It is the small subset of claims about you that some authority has agreed to vouch for, so you can cross a border, open a bank account or pick up a parcel at the post office.
Identity is a network
In a world with a single human being, identity would make no sense. Nobody to recognize you, nobody to compare yourself with, nobody asking you for proof. Identity is an abstraction: how you see yourself inside the context of how others see you.
To digitalize the identity experience you have to start from this point of view. It implies a network, identities more than identity.
And the communities that defined the social graph of each person have changed radically. A village used to know who you were. Now hundreds of institutions and platforms each hold a small piece of you, and none of them sees the whole thing. That is the starting point for the rest of this series: digital identity is not a card inside a phone, it is a graph of relationships and claims, and the real question is who holds each piece.
Next in the series: Which kind of user experiences are we already using in the context of digital identity?