As you may remember after my enthusiastic discovery of and posting on contxts earlier this year, I use a free texting service as a business card. By use, I mean I have set it up. But I haven’t actually had much use for it. Yet. And while I’m sure I will, this past weekend at a green festival in New Jersey is the perfect example of why the business card still serves a purpose. For the time being. The folks who came out to the event were not an iPhone bumping crowd. These peeps were too cool for excess gagetry. Which is why I wanted to stay in touch with many of them, which brings me back to the original dilemma: how to give out contact info without creating trash at an event where a lot of people aren’t carrying cell phones and even if they are, reply “oh, I don’t text” if you mention that option.
I ended up writing down my info on scrap paper, which is a perfectly acceptable solution. And even though the vast majority of social settings I encounter involve people twitching to check their mobile device every two seconds (myself included), I still want a “slow card” option. And it must look good.
Enter instructables. The other day someone posted a how-to guide for creating your own plantable paper notecards.
Plantable notecard via Instructables
This is an idea I’ve thought of for business cards—as in having them printed on paper with embedded flower seeds. But now I’m thinking, a) why not make them myself with my own designs and b) why not use the plantable paper cards as small batch event take-aways with the name of the site and continue to participate in the paper-free mobile revolution for personal contact info? So that’s the plan. Stay tuned for tales of paper making mishaps as everydaytrash dares to ask: can homemade seed cards be sleek and chic? And the important follow up question: will New Yorkers plant them?
For more on paper-free digit exchange, I recommend this short episode of MobileBehavior called “Will Mobile Kill the Business Card?“. Industry experts weigh in, including my sister who has the best idea of all (no bias!): let there be music.
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