The next product you buy will not be designed by a human. Meet the Artisanal Intelligence process and the Spawns collection.

What happens when artificial intelligence and human designers work together to create new products?

London, 23 November 2022

With the Spawns collection, award-winning creative company oio is pioneering new design processes involving artificial intelligence from conception all the way to manufacturing. Joining forces with jewellery brand and hypercraft designer giosampietro, they let us peek into the future and imagine a world where everyday objects will be created by machines and humans alike. Oio's first series of such products is a silverware collection of eating accessories featuring a signature look, a unique feel, new and unseen opportunities in usage. Dreamy in their design but crafted with impeccable quality and precision by one of the most renowned silversmith factories in Italy, the items are only available in a limited run of a hundred pieces, making these accessories a must-have collector's item — the first product designed together with an artificial intelligence.

the spawns collection

sample image • more pictures available upon request • press@oio.studio

The limited edition collection provokes and prompts reflections on the role of non-human intelligences in creative practices. New tools centred around this technology experienced a tremendous acceleration in the past few years. Creative company oio and giosampietro are taking it one step further, effectively launching a product that can be purchased and used in our everyday lives, designed from scratch with the help of an artificial intelligence in a process they coined as “Artisanal Intelligence”.

the spawns collection

sample image • more pictures available upon request • press@oio.studio

Artisanal Intelligence is a new design process the two brands are pioneering, involving a constant dialogue between human designers and a series of artificial intelligences, at different steps along the development line. To create the Spawns collection they started by collating an archive of several thousands images representing different tableware accessories — spoons and forks and knives from the past centuries, in what is called a “dataset”. They then spoon-fed the dataset to a generative algorithm, which started to learn from the collected images until it was able to generate new tableware designs. The human designers then selected the most interesting images, the ones hinting at new forms and functionalities. The selected images were then interpreted by giosampietro, who turned the output of the algorithm into a series of finished designs that could be industrially manufactured.

the spawns collection

sample image • more pictures available upon request • press@oio.studio

the spawns collection

sample image • more pictures available upon request • press@oio.studio

The decision to create tableware accessories as their first Artisanal Intelligence products can be traced back to an essay from Ernesto Nathan Rogers, titled: “From the spoon to the city”. In his editorial for Domus Magazine in 1952, the Italian architect laid out a vision for a total architectural practice, one where the all-knowing designer could solve humanity's problems through design, starting from something as small as a spoon all the way to complex cities. Through the “Spawns” collection, the authors are envisioning a different reality where humans are not at the centre of the design process, but work together with other intelligences to solve complex challenges. A spoon for our times.

the spawns collection

sample image • more pictures available upon request • press@oio.studio

The result is a beautifully crafted series of three silver spoons, produced in a total of a hundred pieces. Even if the design process involves cutting-edge technology, the actual manufacturing was carried out through the ancient silversmith craft, forged by esteemed Italian silverware factory Greggio Argenterie. They are produced to one of the highest quality of silver specification, called: “The Grand Hotel Standard”. The collector's items are available to purchase from oio's very own online store. They come in a custom protective packaging, with proof of authenticity and serial number.

💬 Quotes

"While working on such mind-bending projects it often feels like exploring new design territories, almost like doing things for the first time. There is no blueprint for these new processes and we usually end up creating our own creative tools from scratch, which is not very efficient but on the upside it leads to surprising unique results, exactly what happened with the Spawns collection. Most of the projects we do at oio are pushing these boundaries between design and technology, mostly blurring the lines between them."

Matteo Loglio - oio design director and co-founder

"The Artisanal Intelligence process is a way to try and bridge together the distant worlds of Artificial Intelligence and Craftsmanship, of digital pixel and melted atoms, of ‘magic' automation and handmade stuff. By working at every step in a dialogue between us and algorithms, we do not make our life easier, actually the opposite, but the resulting products that we show in the Spawns collection, are something that would have never come out from a human or a machine working by themselves."

Simone Rebaudengo - oio futures director and co-founder

"For every project I craft a miniature universe of processes and unstable algorithms. Then the universe makes the work. I call it Hypercraft. For the Spawns collection I created a toolbox to spawn sinuous three-dimensional forms from the pixelated images we got from the artificial intelligence. We don't feel that digital processing cancels the craftsmanship element, quite the opposite. It's not about automation but rather, so to speak, an expansion of making by hand, of the language of traditional jewellery design: the outcome is hand-coded, which is even more handmade."

giosampietro

About oio

London-based award-winning creative company oio was founded in 2020 by ex-Google, startup founder and designer Matteo Loglio together with fiction writer, futurist and designer Simone Rebaudengo. They are a team of humans and machines on a mission to turn emerging technologies into an accessible, everyday and sustainable reality by helping big companies and small startups to design products and tools for a less-boring future. Some of their clients include Google, Samsung, IKEA, Logitech and Space10 among others. Their work is featured in TIME Magazine, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, Domus, Wired among many others, and their projects exhibited in galleries and museums such as MoMA in New York, V&A in London, or Triennale Museum in Milan.

About giosampietro

giosampietro is an eponymous jewelry brand founded in 2022, based in Italy. Emerging from a vision he calls Hypercraft, Gio's designs are born out of the joyful clash between traditional craftsmanship and the speed of the extreme present. The brand celebrates the tension between the organic and the synthetic with an act of balance between sensual forms and generative systems. Hypercraft is a love letter to calculated chaos, searching for forms that none of us has ever seen.

Links and images

More information, additional and higher quality images available upon request at press@oio.studio. Thanks!