A commission by the Dutch Ministry of Finance to design a proposal for a commemorative Euro coin celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands.
My proposal revolves around the notion of a coin as a carrier of scientific data, describing the 30% decline of global biodiversity over the last 50 years. It is thereby both a call for engagement with the cause of the WWF and it provides the actual data that signifies this dramatic decline. The coin's obverse (heads side) shows a graphic structure generated by a computer program known as the game of life: a simple mathematical simulation of "life" on a two dimensional grid. This structure – representing a petri dish at micro level or a planet at marco level – forms a 0.3mm relief of spatial pixels that under a "magnifying glass" reveals the portrait of the queen. The coin's reverse (tails side) shows a visualization of the data (acquired from the Zoological Society of London) as a downwards spiral spanning the last 50 years. Its structure, which is similar to the coin's obverse, starts as a rich diversity that gradually thins out towards the present.