Austin Houldsworth graduated from the Royal College of Arts with an MA in Design interaction; having previously studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He strives to create solutions to the problems that are often neglected by industry; sometimes ‘fixing’ thing’s which physically speaking, are not ‘broken’.
To think of money as simply an exchange system belies the true extent of its history and the influence it can have on the way we think and behave.
The Future of Money Award is designed to act as a platform between the financial industry and creative practitioners. Giving designers and artists a chance to present there ideas to an audience of financial payment experts and industry leaders. Arguably there has been no greater time of financial uncertainty than today and no greater need of fresh ideas and imaginative insights.
2011 winning project - The Money Trailer
http://www.dotmancando.info
In conjunction with Consult Hyperion’s Digital Money forum sponsored by Visa Europe and Monitise
Money can simply be understood as a representation of goods and services, as such there has always been a constant arms race between the people who print currency and those who copy it. New technologies are constantly developed and implemented in order to keep ahead of the counterfeiters / hackers and help retain the value within objects that (materially speaking) are valueless.
Intricate illustrations, watermarks and foil have been used to make banknotes as secure as possible, although with the advent of home printing this old technology is at a crossroad. What does the future hold for hard currency... What if paper were replaced with plastic? If the watermark was substituted with a microchip? And the illustrations replaced by electronic displays? Such advances in technology would change the designer’s constraints and allow for a completely new system of trade to be developed.
We are now accepting entries for the 2011: Future of Money - Design Award.
Creative practitioners from across the UK are invited to submit a design, based around a proposed ‘smart banknote’ system, a potential replacement for existing paper notes. Your vision isn’t limited to a specific medium, but should be based around the technological specifications/limitations of the smart banknote system.
We are looking for inspired visual designs, ingenious inventions, insightful stories and unexpected consequences of such a technology.