Designing Money
When you're designing something as omnipresent as money, you're operating in an area of ambient design — an area with a set of affordances quite unlike any that we might consider "normative". But that doesn't exactly mean that the standard rules don't apply.
If you’re keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you’ve probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.
The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:
I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.
I’ve always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?
The argument here is not one of degree, but of manner: the way in which the design of money counts is different than the way in which, say, the design of iPods counts. People’s notice of the coinage is one of total passive engagement. Allow me to emphasize again that the engagement, although passive, is total.
To wit: If there’s one thing I deal with more than my iPod, it’s money. But I deal with my money in a totally operative context. It’s a medium of exchange, and therefore it’s status as an object as such is, let’s say, fuzzy around the edges.
That’s why I find Dent’s solution so interesting. On the one hand, it employs some of the Gestalt principles that are becoming a theme here on BlogLESS. The £1 coin provides the mental context for understanding the negative-space puzzle constituted by the smaller-denomination coins. This is a trope that we (DLB) understand to be highly effective, but effective precisely because of the active engagement it requires from the viewer.
On the other hand, this engagement requirement is offset by the varying shapes and sizes of the coins, which are internally differentiated to such an extent that one could (and certainly will) easily engage with one’s money without ever having to look at the coins themselves.
So there’s an interesting tension operating here, between a sort of very demanding (or at least engaging) visual design, and a power-of-profiles tactile design that seems to negate the former.
The most excellent moment, though, is to imagine that – as Dent seems to suggest – this tension is resolved in "just having fun with them," which, we’ve said before, may very well be what it’s all about in the first place.
