Identity Card Exploration for IDEO
Conceptual Business Cards
This collection presents a series of business cards that explore and express possible future value systems. More than just imagining new communication and display technologies, these concepts explore the complex emotional and societal issues that surround the simple, daily act of exchanging business cards. Here are cards that use a hair or blood sample as a measure of trust, and cards that communicate with each other, and a card that ages once you give it away. Working around themes such as identity, privacy, security, the value of physical objects, community, and the moment of exchange, these twenty-two cards exist only as concepts, but raise intriguing questions about the future.
The cards were created by sixteen of IDEO’s human factors, interaction, and industrial designers, working in San Francisco, Chicago, and London. Another IDEO group in Palo Alto assembled the finished imagery into an elegant website, viewable at www.ideo.com/identity.
IDEO uses these explorations to consider issues that are raised—but often not addressed—in our client work. They follow the same design process we use with our clients’ projects, while giving our designers an exercise constrained only by imagination. A portion of this project appeared in January 2001 issue of Wired magazine.
Project date: 1999
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