I came across this remarkable piece of work earlier today. It’s a design created with 250,000 euro cents in a public square with the intention that people would interact with it, presumably by taking (or rearranging?) the coins. Even though it’s €2500 lying there, it would take a fair bit of determination to take the lot and get it to (at least) a coin-changing machine, a level of hard work a casual thief is unlikely to want to do I think. The Amsterdam police viewed it rather differently, seeing all this money left on the pavement as being at risk of theft and swept the whole lot up for safekeeping. Rather keen of them, no? The site ExperimentaDesign explains some of the background to the project:
Droog Design and Scott Burnham have assembled a team of some of the most innovative designers and architects from around the world to create 13 newly designed interventions, tools, toys and objects that are temporarily placed along a route on the central IJ-riverfront in Amsterdam.
The design is remarkable and attractive, and there are a few pictures and videos of it before it was ‘saved’. The people building it are clearly working from a plan, but there isn’t a copy of it online that I can find unfortunately. I’ve combined these two photos by Jens to show the whole design - it’s a bit rough but you get the idea:
