I. Welcome back & follow up
Good Morning and thank you again for inviting me into your inbox. I write about insights and provocations on the evolving nature of digital design. You can always subscribe here.
🔎 Related to Building studio ‘types’
I mistakenly wrote “To this day, we have had zero attribution in the Amsterdam studio”. I meant “To this day, we have had zero attrition in the Amsterdam studio”
Now, on to this week’s newsletter!
II. Two posts from Slack
This week, instead of a specific topic, I thought I’d share two posts from our internal Slack channels. The first on my basic thoughts and understanding on NFT’s and a second one the one-year anniversary of being in lockdown due to COVID. I felt both of these show off our studios culture and thought process in small ways.
🖍️ NFT’s
With all the talk around NFT’s, or non-fungible tokens, someone asked me to share my overall thoughts.
I have three basic thoughts on the topic
1. I like the idea of experimenting with digital ownership. The original idea of ‘digital’ and the web was to infinitely copy and reproduce things. Music, movies, news - a land of abundance.
Now as we progress, we're seeing a need to try and create scarcity and value. Games have this inside an ecosystem - an item can be sold for real money, as that item took time to get. So in that case time creates an item of value which is sold. Now we're trying to produce that in a global ecosystem. Although now it’s not simply time, but really any way in which we assign value to an object. For art this of course starts with the artist themselves and assigning value based off that… and several other vectors like desirability, current zeitgeist, culture, and more
2. I think the term NFT, and the current hype, distracts us from the overall idea of creating digital ownership. Like how BTC distracts us from the bigger picture of crypto / decentralised currency.
Instead, for NFT’s, let's start with the question of do we want digital scarcity and what does it mean? Don’t get distracted by what it is now, but rather what it can become as the digital space grows.
3. NFT is like anything we put value to. Action Comics #1 first print is worth millions, and the same exact comic can be printed now and worth €1 euro because we agree that the original has some value. It's literally infinitely reproducible, and we care about the original because we all agree. This is the same. I think older generations struggle with this concept because they see digital as a secondary citizen to the real world, while younger generations see digital as first class.
It’s captured well here…
https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
“This anti-digital snobbery is an example of the members of the old guard living in denial about the Internet’s role as the primary driver of global culture.”
—> Want some more interesting reading on situations around NFT’s to get you started?
a16z recently put out All About NFT’s
Packy over at Not Boring has a great piece on DAO’s - Distributed Autonomous Organisations.
🥪 One year anniversary of COVID lockdown
During one of our team meetings, one of our design leads, Lily, mentioned it was the one-year anniversary of our lockdown and working from home. She asked what reflections we might have. I contemplated this for a week, and shared the following on our teams Slack channel.
First, a huge thank you to Lily for everything - including running our Monday Morning Meetings during our last year and making sure we had time to connect on a non-work level!
Last week she brought up we were at our one year anniversary of lockdown, and if we had any reflections… so….
I wanted to share how proud I was of everyone here in how we’ve handled the last year - work and personal - in support of each other. I can’t imagine anyone will look back on the last year fondly. However this forced test of distributed working has driven our ability to be more nimble in how we work, and pushed us to be more innovative in our style, setting us up for a better future.
It’s also been frustrating, tiring, and often wreaked havoc on our mental health. We want time off, but find ourselves bored at home so don’t take it. We miss our families and friends, and only have our own patience to help us. We want a plan when there is only ambiguity.
The hardest part of a marathon is the last few steps when you can see the finish line. The way we finish this is the way we started this - together! As we see the light at the end of the tunnel, let’s continue to stick together, taking each day as it comes! Looking forward to the lunch gathering this week!
Rock!🔥
That’s all for this week!