In 1952, Ernesto Nathan Rogers wrote that by carefully examining an object as simple as a spoon, we could understand the kind of city and society that produced it. Inspired by his words, we worked together with algorithmic machines to create a spoon for our times - the Spawns collection. It's a spoon but it is not a spoon. Spawned by machines and crafted by humans.
(c) Pepe fotografia
A combination of traditional artisans and futuristic artificial intelligences working together to create radically new products. The result is a limited collection of a hundred 'eating accessories,' each designed and manufactured from scratch and made available for purchase on the oio store.
(c) Pepe fotografia
(c) Pepe fotografia
The Spawns collection is a collaboration with hypercraft designer giosampietro. The project also became part of the permanent collections of the mudac Design Museum in Lausanne and the MAK Design Museum in Vienna.
(c) Pepe fotografia
THE PROCESS
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The process started by handpicking images of spoons, forks, knives, and other eating utensils, both online and in real life. This communal effort resulted in a massive folder of several thousand images. This was our initial "dataset".
We then used an open-source machine learning algorithm known as "StyleGAN" to train our own artificial intelligence on the dataset of images we collected, for generating infinite and unexpected variations.
After generating many images with our custom AI tool, together with giosampietro, we created a series of tools to transform 2D images into 3D forms. We called it 'virtual press'.
(c) giosampietro
The final step involved physically manufacturing our designs into a series of eating accessories that look like spoons. We worked with Greggio Argenterie, one of Europe's oldest silverware factories.
(c) giosampietro
Using 15-micron silver-plated brass, thickly plated, commonly referred to as "The Grand Hotel Standard", they forged raw metal into an impeccable set of products, hand-polished and soup-ready.
