Archive

It is the pride and honor of every designer to have the opportunity to work on something that is truly profound. Such opportunities, like designing the Jüdisches Museum, Berlin or the Tube Map for London’s Underground, seldom grace the life of a designer. But, the opportunity to design a country, is one that almost never happens.

That is, until Dutch designer Daniel van der Velden was commissioned in 2003, to design money, passports and stamps for the abandoned water fortress off the British coast, proclaimed to be the independent micro-nation of The Principality of Sealand.

As disputed and controversial as this nation status may be, the project to conceive Sealand’s visual identity was not without complexity. Part and parcel to ‘The Sealand Identity Project’ and the uniqueness of this man-made, self-proclaimed nation, was the internet, as global archive.

In a press release in 2003, Van der Velden is quoted as saying:

The consequences of the internet’s daily usage, its universal vastness and its potential to blur the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, will be key operators in the design methods employed.nettimes.org

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On Friday night I attempted step outside of the world of digital media and information superhighways and attended the The Edwardian World’s Faire, here in San Francisco.

The Edwardian period fascinates me for the fashion and adventure our modern lives seem so miserably to lack. The outing we planned, was intended as a brief departure into this world, and to my surprise it was very nearly approaching successful. I left behind all traces of my contemporary life, barring my iPhone and six one dollar notes, all minted in the last 3 years.

My inability to part with my iPhone, for a night in the early 1900s, is excusable by my standards, but my reasons and the resulting outcome turned out to be quite contrary. There are a dozen or more reasons why I love my iPhone, but the camera was never among them. It is fine, in all practical senses, but I have never purchased a phone for it’s camera. And I’ve never considered a mobile phone camera to truly manifest any of the prerequisite qualities of an actual camera. The evenings excursion, however, proved the iPhone camera otherwise.

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Years ago, while I was studying art at the Baskin Visual Arts Center, we were tasked with constructing an on-the-spot, interactive art piece. We had about 20 minutes to come up with a compelling art piece that embodied the fundamental principals of interactivity.

For this project I partnered up with one of my classmates. Five minutes later, we had our masterpiece. It was simple and direct. We stood before the class with two cardboard signs, a box of chewing gum and a stack of singles. The sign around my neck read, “Scream in my face for a dollar.” The sign by my partner read, “For a dollar, I’ll put another stick of gum in my mouth.”

It was the most beautiful play on an age old child’s game. We started out with 100 $1 bills and finished with close to $160, not that that was our aim by any means. Don’t ask me how he fit all that gum in his mouth; I really couldn’t tell you.

The reason I bring this up, is because this silly little piece has a lot in common with web design. Don’t believe me?

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