Web3 and The Future of Luxury, Part III: Phygital Craftsmanship
IRL Web-3 Café by Crosby Studios at Galerie Charraudeau.
Heritage luxury brands like Hermès and Chanel know a thing or two about craftsmanship. In many ways, their whole identity revolves around it. But while some wonder if traditional handicrafts can still exist in the digital world, others already are finding ways to make it happen through phygital design. The brands that flourish in Web 3 will find ways to redefine craft traditions, design for both virtual and real worlds, and recreate a digital experience in real-world products.
While many brands are satisfied with using AR to enable customers to visualize merchandise for their homes, others are seeking further ways to create mixed realities (MR) that blur the physical and digital divides. Crosby Studios’ Harry Nuriev is one such designer. His signature checkerboard pattern of white and soft grey creates a banal backdrop on which explodes vibrant pops of color. It also resembles the checkerboard background Photoshop uses to display transparency in digital images. This resemblance is not a coincidence—Nuriev’s interiors seek to create the look and feel of living inside a digital space. But why stop there?
Video Game furniture by Crosby Studios.
Taking this concept a step further, Crosby Studios opened a pop-up installation in Paris’s Galerie Charraudeau. Titled The Web-3 Café, the pop-up (which was, indeed, a functional café) was open to visitors from March 4 to April 4, 2022. The installation featured familiar furniture pieces from the Crosby Studio catalog, only with a digital twist—each piece had been given a rasterized 8-bit aesthetic. Designed by Nuriev, an active gamer, the installation also heralded the future release of the studio’s own video game that will allow players to decorate virtual spaces with digital versions of the pixelated pieces used in the café. Players (and non-players) can also decorate physical spaces with this line of furniture, which has been released by Crosby Studios as their Video Game collection.
If that makes your head spin, that’s partly the point. Nuriev is purposefully blurring our real and digital landscapes with physical pieces that look digital and vice versa. More and more, we will continue to see this blurring of realities as designers draw phygital inspiration from both directions.
Take, for instance, Fendi and Kueng Caputo showcased their Roman Moulds furniture collection at Art Basel 2021 against a backdrop of wavy QR code pixels. When scanned, the codes showed the 3D-rendered pieces from Kueng Caputo creating a fully phygital experience. Later that year, A+A Cooren Studio and digital artist Miguel Chevalier released a collection of pieces initially conceived in 2016. Titled Sitting in a Cloud of Pixels the collection includes an armchair, sofa, rug, and magnifying coffee table, all in a pattern of smalls squares of white, black, and grey resembling scrambled QRs. CS Rugs is even bringing phygital craftsmanship into your living room with their Pixelated Collection of carpets that embed the QR code into the pattern design. Scanning the code opens a special educational platform with information related to the rugs.
This is not the first time the 8-bit aesthetic seduced designers. After the release of the first iPhone in 2008, the internet became mobile for the first time, creating a seismic shift in how people used and experienced the Web. Designers responded with products that visually referenced this new world, broken down to its basic element, the pixel. Pieces by renowned designers like Ron Arad (Do-Lo-Rez Collection, 2009), Studio Nucleo (Primitive Collection and Prsenze Chair, 2011), and even Joris Laarman’s Pixel Chair (2014) offer examples of how long the 8-bit aesthetic has remained in circulation. Today, as discussion of Web3 and the Metaverse enter the mainstream, we are once again seeing this inspiration in physical design.
Paint it like Pantone, Lizzo!
But what does all this mean to the future of craftsmanship? First, it means craft traditions will still be alive and kicking in the era of Web3. All the above examples have both physical as well as digital components. Instead of killing consumers’ appetites for physical products, the metaverse will instead increase their cravings to bring what they see online into their homes. Second, our definition of craftsmanship will shift with the media. Anyone who does not believe there is craft in digital design has never spent time navigating the intricacies of Autodesk, Adobe, and other design software families. The learning curve is real, as is the skill and talent needed to perfect the art form. Just as it did with the invention of the jacquard loom, the sewing machine, and other such devices, our definition of “hand-made” will expand to include aspects of technology. This is already happening with the use of 3D printing and CNC machining which allows for the creation of intricate and experimental designs impossible to complete by hand alone. No one accuses a Joris Laarman chair of poor craftsmanship.
Lastly, craft will continue to inspire, no matter which reality you choose to spend time in. Singer and fashion icon Lizzo knows this. Her colorful outfit at the 2022 SXSW festivals drew comparisons to Home Depot color samples, as well as harkening a bit to 8-bit. While the “Truth Hurts” singer laughed off the comments, she and her stylist Jason Rembert are definitely onto something: pixels are luxury’s new best friend.
