2022 Galleries

The Spark Gallery pages are one of our most popular design destinations, with thousands of visitors each year. Check out some of the latest Spark entries, in the galleries below.

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."