Artists and designers throughout history have explored the idea of identity in many ways through their subjects, concepts, and techniques. My exploration of identity takes the State Identification Card, an object that is already used to identify people, and re-imagines it in a more effective and personable way in both design and function. My design concept is based off of the unique print of the finger, which is something that develops on all humans before birth and remains the same throughout life. The print formation on each finger is a special combination of about twelve different ridges that if examined, can be matched to the actual hand of the person. There can be over one hundred marks found on a single print, so for my new design of the ID I have collected that data found on the thumb print of the participant's dominant hand and symbolically represented the data on the ID card among other essential information. Ideally, the pattern that appears on the card would work much like a barcode, a machine readable representation of data, and allow a more effective way to identify that person. My new design not only celebrates the beauty of this natural pattern formation, the fingerprint, but also advances the methods used in state issued licenses.
