Clever design = International intrigue
May 8th, 2007The Associated Press reported a story today that reminded me of the challenges one can face when introducing radically new designs to a naive user group.
A few years ago, the Canadian mint used a new technique to create a 25 cent coin featuring a red poppy inlay. The poppy flower is Canada’s symbol of Remembrance Day, a national time of mourning similar to Memorial Day in the United States.
But nobody explained that to the U.S. Army.
Photo by the Royal Canadian Mint.
Military contractors traveling through Canada–and apparently doing a little shopping– convinced themselves that foreign agents were sneaking radio transmitters into their wallets.
They handed their superiors reports that described the Canadian quarter as being some kind of device that was “filled with something manmade that looked like nanotechnology.” To make matters worse, the Canadian mint overlaid these flowers with a protective enamel that produces a blue rectangle over the poppy when viewed under a black light.
Despite the existence of 30 million Canadian coins with this design, the US Defense Security Service went on to issue a series of warnings to US personnel about the dangers of Canadian spy coins. They never bothered to look at the coins first.
The Canadians, understandably alarmed at this abuse of their currency by unknown “spies,” were denied access to these reports, and so were unable to explain that that “they’re just quarters, eh?”
–
Post script. I have to admit being very surprised last November when, overnight, everyone on our TV channel out of Vancouver seemed to be wearing odd stylized red patches on their lapels. Canadians seem to take this holiday very seriously; it lasted for weeks.