2022 Galleries

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Galleries // 2022 Spark:Digital // Kintsugi Upgrades

Kintsugi Upgrades

Finalist

Competition: Spark:Digital
Designer: Afshin Mehin - CEO and Designer
Design Type: Concept
Company / Organization / School: Card79
Website: http://card79.com
Team Members: Afshin Mehin, Mark Choi & Levi Joo

Kintsugi Upgrades is an NFT collection that uses the Japanese mending technique called kintsugi to combine medieval and post-classical artifacts with high-tech functionality, creating a product that exists in a purely digital realm. This project imagines what new design opportunities exist for product design when the final product is purely digital. This project started by sourcing high-quality 3D scans of ancient cultural artifacts scanned by some of the world's leading museums. We then took these artifacts and started to digitally shatter them - something we would never be able to do in real life - and then began rebuilding them from and augmenting them with new functions and components.This series represents a clash of the old and the new but ultimately works in service of the future by creating objects that will populate virtual worlds. We are compelling the industrial design discipline to consider how utility and functionality will play a role in digital spaces. Since these objects are also intended to be stored on the blockchain, this project also sparks the conversation of who will have access to these products within the digital realm.

JUDGES COMMENTS:

"Interesting concept, great visualization."

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Download Official Certificate of Recognition
Certificate of Recognition

Inspired by real-world artifacts, the Kintsugi Upgrades NFT Collection gives a futuristic form to ordinary ancient objects through the Japanese method of mending with gold powder known as kintsugi.
Kintsugi Upgrades attempts to define the future of design by rebuilding ancient objects into innovative ones and augmenting them with enhanced technology, finding new functions in the digital realm.
Each NFT is designed after a digitally scanned real-world artifact, artificially shattered, reimagined with enhanced technologies, and transformed into futuristic objects in the metaverse.
KU-14: Aidone was discovered on the Italian island of Sicily. It was rebuilt using an integrated beverage fermentation system that uses fungal mycelia, the root-like structures found in fungus.
KU-12: Cántaro is a smart beverage container that supports health goals on a chemical level. It keeps a database of drink ingredients and creates beverage recipes based on user compatibility.
KU-11: Caligo is a diffuser with sophistication and superior functionality. It creates a cloud of aromatherapy vapor and sterilizes it with UVC light creating a calm and relaxing ambiance.
KU-10: Azote is a vessel optimized for lyophilization, known as freeze drying. We preserved its ceramic body and integrated space-age freeze-drying methods with the age-old food preservation process.
KU-09: La Reina ward off micro-chemicals and viruses in the air by dispensing an antibiotic nanofiber spray technology on its top part, providing an extra layer of defense over objects used daily.
KU-08: Nam Sách is made to help civilization that has left Earth transport plants to new planetary frontiers. Plants survive regardless of its surrounding because of KU-08's self-leveling technology.
KU-07:Alhambra is a compost bin engineered to produce high-quality soil from food waste designed for a future world with depleted natural resources, creating a need for self-sustained food production.