Building the Evolution of the Web through Design
Episode Summary
Welcome to the Summer Series of Culture Factor. I’m Holly Shannon.
When I spoke at this year’s NFTNYC, I used my down time to interview the experts about their engagement in the Web3 space. We’ve talked on Culture Factor a lot about *what* Web3 is and *how* it’s being used, but I wanted to try and understand *why*.
Almost every person I spoke to had a similar reason for being part of Web3. They all wanted to help fulfill our most basic, fundamental, evolutionary need: connection.
This is unsurprising. Connection has always been at the core of the web itself. The difference between web 1, 2, and 3 are the methods used, and tech available, to generate connection.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to explore the methods that artists, collectors, and businesses use to bring about connection. .
I'll break down the whys, not just the whats, of this new digital space we find ourselves in.
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Transcript
Holly Shannon
Welcome to the summer series of Culture Factor. I'm Holly Shannon. When I spoke at this year's NFT NYC, I used my downtime to interview the experts about their engagement in the Web 3 space. We've talked on Culture Factor a lot about what web three is and how it's being used. But I wanted to try and understand why. Almost every person I spoke to had a similar reason for being part of web three, they all wanted to help fulfill our most basic fundamental, evolutionary need: connection.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to explore the methods that artists, collectors and businesses use to bring about connection. I'll break down the whys not just the watts of this new digital space we find ourselves in. Hello, Culture Factor family, welcome back to the summer series. Now throughout this episode, I'm going to refer to a few ideas from week one of this series. So you might want to go back and listen if you haven't already. Last week, we closely examined user experience in web three in terms of accessibility and community. Businesses, collectors and artists work together to design the user experience. But I'll take it one step further. They also design the web itself.
Will Pemble of Coaster Punks 1:18
Web three is not a whole new language, it's just a new dialect of a language that's been around since 1972. And, and before, so web three needs just like tactically, functionally web three can't work without the web two, infrastructure and web two can't work without the web one backbone. So all of those things are connected. This is a really cool, I mean, coastal punch is a fun project. Because, you know, we've got 15 year old web three designers working alongside 60 year old Disney Imagineers, and, and everybody in between. So that's a really, really cool way to see all of this stuff come together in ways that make every faction pretty happy.
Holly Shannon 2:03
You probably recognize that voice again. That's Will Pemble of Coaster Punks. I interviewed him a few weeks ago, and then had the good fortune to meet up with him again at NFT NYC. So he's in last week's episode. And the reason why he's back is he explains this idea so well, that web two and web three are not discrete entities, they are not even distinct from web one. All of these iterations of the web are extensions, evolutions of each other, they are present in one another. From my conversations, I've gathered that one problem many businesses are trying to solve for is the user's perception that web3 is entirely separate from web2. And as a result, they'll have to do an overwhelming amount of work just to participate in it. This ties in to last week's discussion of accessibility and user experience, how are people working to make web three accessible for users,
Niko Nikolaou of Moonwalk 3:00
I think we're seeing a lot of interest from people that want to be in the web three space, and don't know how to get started. And they don't want to take on the technical burden of building it out auditing a contract, making sure that it's safe. You've seen a lot of projects that I have had, you know, security breaches or they got locked out or anything like that, we create a we have an environment that's safe for people to come in, create a collection and launch it. The other thing I forgot to mention to you is that we'd like to build ourselves as a web 2.5 company. As much as we are forward thinking and want to be decentralized web three, we understand that the majority of people are not there yet. So we have an unbranded wallet that lives inside of a brand's website. And all you need is a login with email, or a social login like Google. And all of a sudden you're in and you can buy an NFT with a credit card, if you wanted to. If you're a little bit more advanced like us, you can connect your Metamask and you can export your NFT if you want to and sell it on the secondary market. So we're seeing people that are very excited about the space and have no knowledge on where to get started come on board. But we also import contracts. And we also work with people that are more advanced that are looking to offer utilities, NF T's which is really where the value comes
Holly Shannon 4:09
Nico mentioned some terms like decentralization, an unbranded wallet, we will talk about the importance of these concepts as they relate to connection in a few weeks. So please put a pin in this and keep it in your mind. For now, here's what I want you to take away from what Nico said. moonwalks efforts to create an accessible platform or design strategies. In addition to designing the user experience, they are designing new technology, redesigning existing technologies to be more accessible and contributing to the overall design of web three. I'm going to repeat that. In addition to designing the user experience, they are designing new technology. They are redesigning existing technologies to be more accessible and contributing to the overall design of web three. That Nemesis has similar design strategies. So this is where I'm going to introduce Alessandro de Grandi. So that you can hear a little bit about what he's doing with his platform.
Alessandro de Grandi:
We move people right now step by step from searching from the their comfort zone, to something that is new. And we prepare for a new economy in terms of web three. If you want the Web 3, we have worked three, if you're you're not ready, we have three, we have all digital assets that work in a digital way classical web too.
Holly Shannon 5:38
the Nemesis is also using gamification, to increase users. And by using gamification, they are creating their product to be familiar by design.
Alessandro de Grandi 5:49
The driver of Metaverse right now are the gamification because all type of gamification, because the people that moving from other platform, our player, so they know how does it work, this type of concept. And they know, how does it work this ecosystem?
Holly Shannon 6:09
I believe the Nemesis Metaverse is really working towards taking what's familiar from social network and from web two, and taking that mass market and moving them into web three with as little friction as possible. So I think that by design, they're trying to make a more comfortable transition. So that's pretty exciting. We've heard how businesses are using design to help users adapt to changes in their experience, what has changed for people on the back end, I met Jovie accidentally, she was creating a painting for believers, you probably remember, Tyler Caffey from last week, she's new to NFT. She's only been in it about a year. And we talked about how her design process has evolved along with web three, she is creating an experience that introduces the digital and physical which is the best of both worlds. However, I'm gonna say I think the medium of painting and the collector actually putting it on the wall will stay close to her heart. But I think she's also really enjoying how developing NF TS is allowing her to collaborate in new and interesting ways.
Jyothee Murali (JYXDI) 7:26
Me personally, I love painting because it's so therapeutic, right? And I don't get that same feeling when I do digital art, it's not the same, right? So I appreciate the medium of painting just because of that. But I enjoy both equally like because painting, if you actually screw up one sees is done, the painting is done, right. But I like with the digital idea of an undo button, right. So there's like different, different, different things that work out for both so so I really like both of them.
Holly Shannon 7:53
Next up is Tammy Lovin, she told me about how design innovation and web three changed not only her design strategies, but what it means to be a product designer in web three.
Tammy Lovin 8:05 And personally, to be honest, for the past two years, I stopped learning new software, because I did found like secondary apps, just like a phone app, or an I bet app that do a lot of the work that I used to do, you know, by modeling and trying to fit stuff 3d wise. And now it's like, really, you don't have to have any type of 3d knowledge, like take for instance VR, right? You can model in VR, just by taking your joysticks or you know, depending on what what type of VR you have. And you can just like go in gravity sketch, and just like wave your hands around there. And at the end of it, you can just like export an STL or GBL or something, no, sorry, URL, and you can just like put it on Opensea, and the platform's automatically automatically lead you, you know, go through it, or you can just like turn it around and like play with it. So it can be a 3d type of NFT even though you don't actually know how to model so. And I think the more time goes on in, the more all of these doctors progress towards people knowing less and less technical aspects of it. So they open up to as many non designed school schools, people, you know, I think it's really going that way. And things are easier by day. Like for instance, when I first started doing VR, Spark AR was really you couldn't find tutorials you couldn't find a community that would talk now there are so many tutorials online you don't have to know stuff beforehand. You just go there you just like follow all the clicks. It's super simple. And you can even you know you can even import something from VR that you did Tilt Brush or paint or you know stuff like that. It's super easy. So don't you worry about that nobody worry about that into years time, everybody, I think it's going to be able to, you know, just do like 3d stuff really, really easy. They're like a bunch of apps for that. Yeah. So my, my job is being obsolete very soon.
Holly Shannon 10:15
Tammy has learned how to adapt. And in that adaption, she has come up with some incredible ideas,
Tammy Lovin 10:20 I'm now working on a very, very cool project that it is about a wearable, which I'm actually wearing right now, it is an aura ring, which is a smart ring that basically tracks all your bio data, you know, like, changes in temperature, bits per minute, like from your heart, you know, all that kind of stuff, like wearable, usually, three straps, you know, like a Fitbit or Apple smartwatch or stuff like that. And I'm actually linking that to an artwork. So basically, the collectors are going to have a very, very special link to me, the artist, because they're going to know infos, like how much I slept last night, you know, like how many hours I slept, because of the way the art works, that's going to change, you know, it's going to be through the async art platform, where you can basically input that our real time and the artwork changes. So that's kind of like my way of doing utility. You know, it's more like an art performance. Rather than offering extra perks. It's more like an insight into my life. It's, it's generally about having a small community of collectors and a very special relationship with them.
Holly Shannon 11:38
The amount of sheer creativity and design prowess that is exhibited in Tammy's work is so impressive to me, I think it is fair to say that her job has changed in some ways that she may not love. But can you imagine the incredible things that will come next,
Tammy Lovin 11:53
I think my job is like slowly going to transition from an modeler and renderer to more like a curator of AI results, you know, and just like tweaking AI results, which I'm no gatekeeper, by the way I don't get deep 3d is like, as more people as they can come to the, the more and better the community is gonna be, you know, and we can all help each other, develop better, prettier stuff, you know, whatever. But I think my job is actually becoming easier and easier with the help of AI, because I'm going to just do final tweaks, instead of just like starting everything from scratch, which is honestly amazing. Because as long as imagination, you know, it's still human. I don't I mean, it is a job that I'm becoming obsolete, in a way, the technical aspect, just like you mentioned, but the output is still gonna be, you know, collab between human and machine, which is great, and I'm looking forward that it's gonna be like, like, super interesting times ahead.
Holly Shannon 12:56
Tammy's work is so important. I'm going to release our entire interview as its own episode, because I think you need to hear more from her. I think we'll and Nico, and a couple other of our guests have really demonstrated that web to him. Web three are not separate entities. You can call web 2.5. You can call it whatever you want. And each of the interviews explained different aspects of the design and how the design is an important method of web three is ultimate goal, which we believe and we hope is connection. But I think at the heart of it is going to be the artists in the collectors that really define what connection means to them. And I think it's going to be on them to demonstrate to all of the companies that are building out in Web 3, what is their true expectation? So my Culture Factor family, how does web three design impact your user experience? I'm on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Wherever you leave a message know that I'll engage with you and others will too. And I may even share your thoughts on the show. This summer is coming in hot please share this episode of Culture Factor now and listen with your friends. It's always more fun that way. And don't forget the rosé.
Season Four of Culture Factor is produced by PaleBlue Studios