Show Me The Money
Published on 3rd November, 2008 by Stephen Lewis
A few months ago I cashed in a load of Premium Bonds, some of which my parents had bought back when I was barely a few months old. As part of the process I had to gather together the bonds themselves, list all their serial numbers, and return them to NS&I.
It was fascinating seeing how the design of the bonds has evolved over the course of three and a half decades, and not a little disappointing. The earliest bonds looked so good that it was actually a struggle to give them up, so much so that I scanned a few before surrendering them forever.
Premium Bonds from the ’70s (serial numbers deliberately blurred).
As I travelled through the designs towards the present however, things became a lot less interesting. Where once the design shorthand of real money had been used to convey the value of the bonds, today they appear as little more than a printout on some headed paper. The newer bonds are worth just as much as the old ones — usually more — but they look to be devoid of value.
Visual indicators of a product’s worth are important, particularly as our lives become increasingly digitised and abstract. This is something I first started thinking about as a furniture design student, back in the early 90s. Microsoft had recently released Encarta, and in doing so had succeeded in cramming all the information contained in an entire library of Encyclopaedia Britannica onto a single CD.
It was impressive stuff, but suddenly there was nothing to distinguish between a cheap plastic CD containing all the world’s knowledge, and a cheap plastic CD containing the latest Chumbawumba single.
The leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes occupying far too much space in my parents’ dining room were undeniably less convenient, and would soon be hopelessly out of date, but they had a gravitas that was completely lacking in their digital counterpart. You respected the information in those books, and it was their appearance that afforded them much of their authority.
Back then I was all for making knowledge and learning available to everyone (I still am), but I was concerned that the packaging of that knowledge could ultimately make it impossible to determine its worth. With that in mind, one of my final year projects became a cabinet for those little plastic discs of knowledge — something that would lend them the authority they were so sorely lacking.
Fifteen years on there are countless websites peddling fallacies as fact, and the world’s favourite encyclopaedia is a community-edited effort with a reputation for inaccuracy. I don’t consider this to be the dystopia my previous sentence might imply, but I do consider the need for a reliable metric by which to judge the value of information to be greater than ever.
Design isn’t the answer to that particular problem, but it would still be nice if money looked like money.
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