INCC

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

The International Non Consumptive Currency, or INCC, is a speculative jewellery-based carbon-credit micro-trading system. INCC is a cross-disciplinary project that aims to enable autonomy, stigmatize unsustainable habits, and reward non-consumptive practices within the current paradigms of society, industry, and politics. As this project is speculative—critical design, it's been called—its intention is to make viewers consider what is valued in our society. Through utilizing already extant conventions and values in our society, INCC subverts these financial and social practices to catalyze social change and a re-ordering of principles.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

The project is camouflaged as a magazine spread from Bloomberg Businessweek: an article on the product on the verso page, with a full page jewellery ad on the other. This kind of covert approach—directly reappropriating corporate design aesthetics—is just one method in which graphic design holds power. Everything in the world is at our disposal, ready to be reappropriated. This assumed basis within the established value system allows for the fictional aspect of INCC to take precedence. A fictional project without a basis in formal reality allows for each individual viewer to imagine the scenario and its ramifications themselves, instead of having a prescribed outcome rammed down our throats.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

To be honest, I don't think there are any concrete benefits to society because of INCC. It would be near impossible to put this concept into practice, but that isn't the point. The point is to dream. Perhaps through dreaming, we can build another reality.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

Quite practically: through working on this project, I was introduced to Rhinoceros 3D, and found thinking in three dimensions easier than I expected. I also received the external gratification of winning the Special Juror's Prize at the 2012 Sustainability Awards in Toronto, Canada.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

A lot of what I talk about in this realm is honesty. To me, it's a virtue above all others when communicating visually. We all have the capability to change the world for better, or for worse. Reduction—branding—is inherently a lie. If we must use our propagative powers to convince someone of something, it better be something worthwhile, and not another scourge to humanity.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Although much of my work is restricted to the white cube of the gallery, the Internet is the primary place where my work is intended to be implemented. On the Internet, it is possible for something to lose and gain new and opposing meanings and contexts. Short of watermarking your images, it is nearly impossible to retain full ownership of something once it enters the online realm. The prospect of losing control of something I've made excites me.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

As previously mentioned, INCC won the Special Juror's Prize at the 2012 Sustainability Awards in Toronto, Canada. I was informed the day of that I was on the shortlist, which seemed odd. Later, I was told that I wasn't on the shortlist, but that the jury stumbled upon INCC while sifting through all the entries, and spent longer discussing it than any of the projects that were on the shortlist. This project's conceptualism was mentioned during the award ceremony, in contrast to much of the very pragmatic industrial design projects, which I hope had the effect of encouraging many more designers to not just think "outside the box," but to destroy the box altogether, and start anew.