“White paper” is not a term that typically excites interest outside of academic circles. Most white papers are dry, scholarly texts that are more focused on delivering numbers and statistics than representing the culture it’s investigating.
Not so with Deep Objects. The decentralized design studio’s publications make for riveting reading. Take, for example, the following passage from “Issue 002”:
"No one who makes things for a living can afford to sit around the house waiting for the muse to call. You have to seek her out. Staying inspired is an iterative process. There’s very little distinction that can be made between the process of inspiration – or 'thinking' – and the process of making."
These words signal a latent energy, like Deep Objects is onto something big. In fact, that passage, besides being far more interesting than what normally appears in a PDF, gets at the heart of Deep Objects’ core ambition: to fundamentally reshape the design process.
Sneakerhead first
Specifically, Deep Objects wants to breathe new life into the link between designers, users, and artificial intelligence–a relationship that has, until now, “watered down design inspiration.”
“We want nothing less than to be the most sought-after design studio in the world,” explains David Stamatis, Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer of FTR, the creative studio behind Deep Objects.
“We want to build a community of curators united in the mission to test the ever-shifting frontier of design and technology. Our goal is to make the discipline of design more equitable, inclusive, and, above all, interesting to more people.”
It was decided that the studio’s first foray into this experimental approach would be with sneakers.
"We chose sneakers because they're the most-talked about design object in culture today,” Stamatis said. He calls them “the ultimate gateway drug” to design and cites a quote from the late designer Virgil Abloh that appears in Deep Objects Issue 01: “My philosophy as an artist is that there’s a line in the sand. This generation may value sneakers more than a Matisse because [the Matisse] is not attainable.”
“In other words,” Stamatis said, “kids used to want to be like Mike. Now they want to be like Virgil."
Exceeding expectations
For a first venture, Collection 001 was daringly intricate. The blueprint was mapped out in stages:
A custom trained GAN model would be used to generate one million sneakers from a highly curated dataset of sneakers
10,000 NFT access passes (minted by HyperMint) would be sold, which would later admit holders into the design studio.
Once they were in, holders would take part in a guided experience that combined game theory and curation in order go from 1,000,000 sneaker designs to 10,000 that formed collection 001
After, the community curation phase began. Voting whittled the pool down to 1,000, then 100, then 30 sneakers.
FTR’s team of award winning designers will transform those 30 2D designs into hand-crafted 3D digital prototypes.
Finally, the “journey from idea to object” ends with everyone voting on which of these 30 shoes becomes a real pair of sneakers.
It was an ambitious goal. With so many moving parts, a single hiccup could send the project crashing down. A decentralized design studio had also never been tried before, but Stamatis and team were all in on attempting something that was the first-of-its-kind.
It paid off.
Before launch, buzz for Collection 001 was generated when Highsnobiety, the leading global fashion and lifestyle magazine, published a feature on the project.
Stamatis is quoted in the article saying he believes there’s an alternative to “the cult of celebrity designer, the starchitect, the figurehead of the office where ego is as loud as the taste that placed them in a position of power”:
"Don’t get me wrong, I'm not against the Ye's, Virgils, or Zaha Hadids of the world. In fact, these are the same figures who carved the paths between industries that helped define my own career choices, which I'm grateful for. But, the master / apprentice model of the design office is tired. The alternative is a hybrid and it involves a community."
The article whetted the appetite of sneakerheads and web3 enthusiasts alike, building anticipation for its launch. From that point, everything hinged on a successful drop–something that, in the burgeoning web3 space, is never a guarantee.
When mint day finally arrived (October 10th 2022), and with all eyes on the project, Deep Objects delivered. With FTR having been part of multiple mints prior to this project and with an experienced internal team, traditional hiccups like a buggy website or spike in gas fees were never an issue. Not only did minting complete without a hitch–the whole collection sold out in less than nine minutes.
“After launching or participating in 100+ drops over the past two years, I can honestly say that you never quite know what to expect,” said HyperMint’s Director of Engineering, Chris Choyce.
“We prepared multiple tiers of access lists, planned out how the public launch would have to go, and mapped out any number of other scenarios,” he said. “In the end the drop was so smooth that we did not need any of our plans. In fact the first tier access list minted so quickly that we initially thought something had gone wrong!”
Secondary sales were even more impressive. Just moments after Collection 001 sold out, it rocketed to the top trending spot on OpenSea and third place by 24-hour trade volume. It was, by traditional measures, an overnight success. But Deep Objects and FTR have their eye on something much larger.
“We fundamentally believe that building great things is hard,” said Brett Danahy, CEO of FTR. “For Deep Objects, so much of that relies on getting the right kind of people to participate. The culturally-curious, the design-conscious, thinkers and makers interested in rethinking processes.”
Danahy believes there’s a certain meta in the NFT space that people look for in projects and from day one. “We wanted to be extremely clear that this is different,” he said, “that we won’t allow short-term market realities to impact the long-term ambitions of the project. So while the immediate sell out was great, it was the caliber of engagement with this new curation process that really stuck out to us.”
The HyperMint factor
Collection 001 was always meant to be democratic, relying on input from its participants. But for the experience to be decentralized, it needed blockchain. Tokenizing access passes was therefore an important piece to the puzzle, and would allow Deep Objects to come out to the world as the first truly decentralized design studio.
“Being a part of the Deep Objects Discord felt like the golden NFT summer of 2021, where NFTs were new to most folks and people were excited about the next drop,” Choyce said. “It was genuinely a joy to support their launch.”
Choyce said people were easily able to connect to the design studio to redeem their access pass. “We had a delayed reveal mechanic to allow time for everyone to mint, but people quickly turned to sharing screen shots of their shoes in the Discord,” he said.
HyperMint handled minting for the access passes, taking care of the most difficult piece. But to deepen the experience, Deep Objects also utilized HyperMint Authenticate, a feature that would enable them to authenticate users based on the ownership of a token in their wallet. HyperMint Authenticate allowed Deep Objects to facilitate the voting process for the 30 best designs (see step four in the project blueprint above).
“Folks minted their initial access pass using our multi-tiered access lists feature, and then were easily able to redeem through a simple wallet connect and our Authenticate feature,” Choyce said.
The redeem process leveraged HyperMint’s robust MetaData API to update the state of the NFT in real-time and to indicate the access card had been used. From there, HyperMint again leveraged the MetaData API to mass update all the NFTs into their reveal state once the design studio closed.
The voting process was similar: each NFT granted the user the ability to vote, which was locked behind a simple-to-use token gate. For each voting round, HyperMint reset the voting state to allow participants to continue the process.
“We also had an amazing development partner in Modern English that wrapped all of our NFT APIs into a seamless web experience,” Choyce said. “This helped Deep Objects bridge the gap between web2 and web3 in a seamless way for their community.”
To learn more about Deep Objects and Collection 001, visit DeepObjects.ai
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