Three Sides of a Coin
Dev Makker
“Please let it ship for less than what’s inside the box!”
That's what I told myself while shipping my most valued possessions from San Francisco as I moved back to New York City. As I itemized these items for insurance—my grandfather's blazer, souvenir tickets to my first Bryan Adams concert—I struggled to quantify things I couldn't bear to lose. With a background in economics and accounting, I found myself pondering the paradox between depreciating value, utility, and sentiment.
Three Sides of a Coin investigates value's instability through film, print, and sound, exploring tensions between sentiment and market logic, sacrifice and appraisal, human worth systems and their translation beyond understanding.
Each experiment dissects a different dimension of worth through deliberate design interventions that materialize abstract concepts into tangible experiences.
The film, Let's Circle Back, examines how value is brokered in human transactions, measuring personal significance against economic reality. While Basically Worthless and Documents on Appraisal of Earth push further, questioning how worth might be perceived by those outside our systems—through unfamiliar professional lenses or entirely foreign states of existence, through conventional editorial methods and by giving sound to quantified data.
By shifting between perspectives, Three Sides of a Coin reveals value as fluid and contradictory—bending under pressure, evolving through context, and sometimes dissolving entirely when viewed from outside. My ongoing design practice continues this exploration, probing the boundaries where worth transcends conventional understanding, trying to find all the sides of a coin.