Design Intelligence #17: Digital real
Digital design styles are coming off the screen into the physical world to be interacted with - on the body, through the senses, and into the spaces we inhabit.
The idea: Phygitals
As our relationship with tech becomes more intimate, and our comfort levels with digital design grow, designers are going phygital in new ways. Pixels become a real-world experience in Pixel Window by Hakusi Katei, which aims to “give a Minecraft vibe to your surroundings” by providing a viewfinder to digitise the world. House of Sylas’ pixel gems use light effects to appear unreal and otherworldly, seeming like glitches in the fabric of reality.
Selfie filters have been influencing beauty standards for some years, with popular filter effects often inspiring new makeup trends. More recently, the creatives whose work has brought on a new wave of cyborg aesthetics are converting their designs into real jewellery and wearables.
Digital artist Ines Alpha has launched her first physical collection with Studio Halia, which connects a unique augmented reality expression to a piece of fine jewellery, designed to be worn on the face. Laila Snevele’s speculative project SENSETOPIA envisions connected wearables that expand our sensory capabilities, using AI and robotics to detect allergens and ingredients in food and send that information to the brain. Over time, Snevele writes, the perception would begin to feel intuitive and automatic, working similarly to the way animals can access information that lies beyond human capacity.
Children’s book author and computer programmer Linda Liukas notes that much of the language of play and physicality has switched from a physical to a digital context. “For many of the children visiting the playground, the most natural public space to meet up is a Fortnite lobby. For them, sandbox mode means a game mod, not a box filled with sand.” She has designed an innovative playground that responds to this shift by making physical, supersized computing interfaces for kids to climb inside. Children can play with pixel building blocks almost their size, walk into the casing of a smartphone, or run over the keys of a Qwerty keyboard.
As the personal privacy threats of digital systems become more clear - from facial recognition surveillance to AI data scraping without consent - products that enable phygital protest and defence are being developed. NeuThroné’s Visionaries sunglasses protect the face from camera scanning by throwing “visual noise” at AI surveillance tools to keep people from being uploaded, tagged and stored as data.
There’s an interesting discrepancy between the blended way we live our lives and the limited language we have available to discuss it. Even as design becomes more phygital, we still see the two states of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as binary - despite the fact that digital experiences are just as real to many people - and we haven’t developed the language to make the distinction smoothly. (My favourite attempt is ‘AFK’ (away from keyboard), which comes from online chat language, and flips the narrative to frame online interactions as the primary mode of being.)
Until we have the words in place to better articulate digital-to-physical dynamics, I don’t think we will have figured them out. But these projects are some of the latest in a long - and fascinating - history of art and technology that has tried to do just that.
📄 Research notes
Brain implants are looking increasingly likely to fundamentally change how mental illness is treated, and they’re getting closer to market. One patient who suffers from depression found that an implant completely “flicked the switch” for him, declaring that “electricity is my medicine”
Climate breakdown will happen more quickly and in more interrelated ways than scientific models allow for. The first ice-free summer day in the Arctic is now expected to occur in 2027
My brilliant former colleague Rachel Arthur has authored a major new report for Textile Exchange called Reimagining Growth, covering the textile, fashion and apparel industry
GirlGuiding’s 72 new badges include Bee Rescuer, Thrift and Nostalgia
Smart cities go more-than-human: Mosaic is a four-year funded research programme that aims to “[transform] cities for multispecies cohabitation, with the help of digital technologies” through initiatives such as Living Labs
☀️ Interesting products
Lightfoot’s solar-powered cargo scooter is fitted with solar panels up its side, so the energy can be used directly as it’s received from the sun, rather than being stored by a battery
Vollebak’s new jumper, hat and scarf are 3D-knitted from a lab-grown material, by biotech company Spiber, that is molecularly engineered to mimic the DNA of plant fibres
Developed as a passion project, the Brick My World app turns smartphone scans of objects into Lego building guides, including step-by-step instructions, using AI-assisted voxelisation
💻 Reading
“You can’t step into a millennial’s apartment today without tripping over a piece of furniture with wiggly lines”. An appraisal of today’s interior design trends, why they’re happening, and what they mean, by Elizabeth Goodspeed