I am a child of the 80’s. Born in ’73, my conscious mind really started to take shape in the years defined by E.T, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Star Wars…, Nintendo Hardware games (Orange Donkey Kong fold up…;), Big Tall Stereo towers, LP records, Neon Colors and my favorite game at that time… “ONDERUIT”. The game ( “Downfall” in English) is a strategic turn by turn, like Zeeslag (“Battleship”) or Vier op een Rij (“four in a row”), but it had something different then the rest. The gears that you would turn would influence the game of your opponent. I absolutely loved that. The objective of the game would be to unload your two times 5 Tokens that would feed in at the top. By turning the gears, the Tokens would fall into the special token spaces available in each of the 5 gears. You could move the tokens down to the catch reservoir at the bottom. Whoever did that the quickest way would win. I used to play this game a lot with my dad and my sister and had one strategy. I would always try to load up the final gear (which had space for 5 tokens) and prepare my turn to have maximum effect by dropping 5 Tokens in the reservoir at once… freaking out my competition…. In this case usually my sister.
Over the years, my 80’s influenced interests and average high school performance lead me to the doors of the university of Technology in Delft. A pretty overwhelming place for someone who actually just wanted to go to art school, but a place I look back to with much appreciation and gratitude for having the patients with a slow burner like myself. In Delft I learned to design industrial products, services & experiences. During my 12,5-year stay (at the time students could pretty much study forever) I learned to control my creative chaotic mind, using the abstract academic frameworks and pathways offered by the faculty of Industrial Design engineering. It took me some time to realize that the PROCESS of DESIGN was actually helping me to give order to my creativity. Learning to see the difference between ideas, concepts and iterative prototypes and creating options as apposed to single minded focus on one idea, was one of the biggest lessons I took away from that place.
When I started my first solo design company called “RIPPLE” (.nl domain for sale by the way), I started to see the benefits of being able to create order and optionality in a world of entrepreneurial chaos, using frames or guidelines that would show an accountable path towards a desired end goal. This ended up literally becoming what I am still doing for clients today. But that is another story.
It was after some time into my studies, doing assignments and miscellaneous design work for others, that I started to realize that I had developed a pattern of working. My own take on the Delft process of Design. Not a particular good pattern, but one that was similar to my one strategy in the “ONDERUIT” game I shared so enthusiastically at the start of this post.
Before I sat down with a client (or fellow students / professors) I would prepare a whole lot of work overwhelming them with a wall of visuals. Something that looked good and combined our shared perspectives. A story that felt like a credible well thought out direction that was ready to go and be successful. There are all kinds of things you can say about working like that, but for the purpose of this post the moment of sharing a lot of (visual) work is key. The moment I would share my in-between progress would feel exactly like dropping the 5 tokens in the reservoir! My 80’s game strategy when playing that kick-ass two person battle game, ended up becoming my preferred way of working whenever I would share my designs with others.
So now …you might be wondering why I would share this somewhat strange and bizarrely personal revelation with you in a random online post. The stories I am putting together on Mirror.xyz/DENACE.eth are part of a bigger picture that has to do with my own personal way of trying to connect with what I think could be the future of collaboration and personal identity…Web3. But am I ready for what it has to offer? Are my present capabilities ready for the future?
The virtual space we have come to know as the internet has been gaining speed. Both in its technical development and its cultural application. This means that the newer protocols, codes/algorithms and the attention on Artificial Intelligence are kind of forcing me to reevaluate the way I operate. Is the way that I design, the way I interact with others, the way online collaboration across the globe is enabling so many people to work and create so many amazing new things together, is that way compatible with my one strategy….my personal design framework?
What this new space is doing for me now is kind of forcing me to test & challenge my old modus operandi. Does my visual abundance strategy, my desire to overwhelm people with visual work, does it still have a future in Web3?
What I am seeing in my daily design doings is that the new iterations in our shared online space, are just too big to get our heads around. For designers and for our clients alike the promises of new relationships with ownership, responsibility & privacy might give you new reasons to worry, instead of opportunities to take advantage of. In order to understand what is changing and from what angles you can approach the Web3 potential, people will need guidance or curated pathways to start and understand what the current changes in the landscape might mean for you.
Because it is happening in so many spaces at once, with so many people trying to create ways for you to connect to why it is important, it is a challenge to understand and see how the future of the internet is relevant to you.
These posts on Mirror & Medium will be my quest going forward in the development of small stories, that can show the way. My explorations will try to overwhelm you with a combination of writing and visualization, making it easier to relate to some of the main themes in Web3, like ownership, privacy, trust and collaboration.
My choice for Mirror as a platform lies entirely with Joshua Nuttall, with whom I am sharing the Perpetual Inquiry Journey. Since the beginning of 2022 I have been collaborating with Joshua Nuttall (josh.mirror.xyz) on a variety of projects in several Thinking domains. Josh has helped me to make my first steps into the realm that is WEB3 .
In the Web3 nature of giving credit to whom it is due: “ONDERUIT” was made and copyrighted by MB games. The “ONDERUIT” game in its original form was blue with a gray base. It had orange yellow green and red tokens. As an attempt to personify the game and link it to my way of thinking I changed the colors in photoshop to suit my own branded needs.
Denace