The password as we know it is in critical condition. These days, with big-name security breaches popping up seemingly as often as Justin Bieber scandals, we’ve had to try to find new ways to secure our online identities. One finger in the dike has been the “strong” password, or the practice of sprinkling numbers, symbols and capital letters into our codes. If “spike” could be guessed with a simple brute force attack, perhaps “Spike!” leaves us a bit safer.

Of course, strong passwords have the same inherent problems as all passwords. As WIRED writer Mat Honan, himself the victim of a devastating hack, evocatively put it, they’re a “Band-Aid that’s now being washed away in a river of blood.” Still, in the here and now, there’s another problem with these so-called strong passwords, according to design student Renee Verhoeven. It’s something much simpler. “People can’t remember them,” she says.

That’s precisely what she tried to tackle with “ID Protocol,” her graduation project at the Royal College of Arts in London. For the project, Verhoeven created a conceptual series of password tools that scrap letters and numbers in favor of personal, mnemonic codes. Mnemonic memory devices have been around in some form or another since the ancient Greeks, and include basic everyday memory tricks like acronyms and rhymes. Teachers love them: Remember committing My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas to memory, to remember the order of the planets?

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