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?
