Hard sell: Designer examines our relationship with money

For the 2014 annual Designers in Residence exhibition at the Design Museum, Stevenson-Keating, along with James Christian, Ilona Gaynor and Torsten Sherwood, were selected to create work that fitted into this year’s theme of disruption, commissioned by the museum director Deyan Sudjic. 

Stevenson-Keating’s interpretation of the theme has been to disrupt what he believes is an increasing distancing from hard cash in the digital age. In order to re-establish a relationship with money, Stevenson-Keating created a mock bank and money-handling operators. One machine requires users to push round every penny they are withdrawing with a handle, while another displays the balance in the account in proportion to an inflated balloon. The exhibition also featured a cash machine that enabled users to withdraw fake money, or insert real cards and have their most recent transactions displayed in the gallery.

Stevenson-Keating’s work comments on how technological advances are increasingly changing our sense of money and its worth. In becoming removed from what we are spending, Stevenson-Keating suggests we are losing the value of money. 

For more on how monetary values are changing, watch the preview of our forthcoming macrotrend, The Meta-value Matrix.