The Design of Currency

Product Design Fundamentals Blog— 01.25.2017

We were asked to critique a poorly designed product for our first blog post. I wanted to examine a product within a system so I decided to look into the product design of cash. Cash interests me because we interact with it at many different levels. There’s the communication design of cash that often reflect a society’s cultural and history in what is represented on the cash. Money itself is a system of product design as a mix of coins and notes of varying dimensions, materials, and weights. Money is also interacted with through digital platforms as well as hybrid systems between physical and digital such as credit cards.

Across the spectrum from coins to notes to credit cards, there are tradeoffs to each of their design. Coins are obviously the least convenient as they are much more difficult to carry and store. That being said it is arguable that they do the best in representing value. It’s easy to not think about the money you spend when you use a credit card and don’t have to physically count the money in your wallet and hand it over. The interaction that comes with the product design of a credit card prioritizes convenience and security at the cost of hiding the exchange between a black veil in which we don’t have to think much about it.

I find this interesting because we tend to think of convenience as a necessity of good design. What’s interesting about cash, whether notes or coins, is that the inconvenience of it shifts the way you think about the exchange of it. The inconvenience of the interaction almost serves as a prompt for careful thinking about the spending that we do. The weight of a coin which while inconvenient may also help you understand the value of it better when you hold it.

The blanket statements of “good” design or “bad” design tend to lack the necessary nuance in understanding the tradeoffs that went into the design of a product.