We are opening a store

That's right, oio's very own store! We just launched it today and you can find it here → oio.store.

The vision for our independent store was sitting in our roadmap for too long, probably since the beginning! One of our dreams has always been to create products and tools that people can use, so this launch makes us very excited indeed.

The oio store is a public front that connects our creative outputs with the real world, extending our ideas beyond the limits of the conceptual space. They become real tangible objects (or virtual and ethereal?) for people to own and buy, and eventually become active elements of our work.

The vision for the oio products is still unfolding, but they will be a mix of our own ideas but especially collaborations with other people, humans and machines alike. They will be limited editions and one-off productions, so keep an eye out as they will sell out fast. To get the latest news you can follow us on Instagram or better join our Discord.

For now we have just one product in our store, but it's a big one. Well, technically they are three products, all part of the same collection - the Spawns.

A spawn for our times

Spawn #22

Our first product is a series of eating utensils: the Spawns collection. In this collaboration with hypercraft designer (and good friend) giosampietro we were inspired by a famous quote, very dear to designers from the last century. A quote from Ernesto Nathan Rogers where he glorifies the all-knowing architect as the shaper of worlds, saving humanity through the power of logic and rationality. But just like design, his sentence did not age well. Our first series or products are the embodiment of this sentiment. New products for a new era, celebrating the post-human and the non-rational.

The Spawns collection was generated together with an artificial intelligence, a machine learning algorithm that worked with us at every step in the creative process, from concept and ideation all the way to design and manufacturing. We did it the old school way, collecting a large dataset of images to train our own algorithm from scratch, rather than using prompts as people do these days.

After selecting the designs hinting at new unexpected aesthetics and functionalities from the ones suggested by the algorithm, we turned to Hypercraft designer giosampietro. He connected our generative latent space into something real, that a traditional silversmith could produce, by developing a series of custom digital tools to convert the two-dimensional images into 3D models that could be sent to the factory for manufacturing.

A spawn detail

The beautiful set was finally fused into metal by Greggio Argenterie, one of the most important silverware factories in Italy. The very limited edition collection (only a hundred pieces!) is now available in our store, until it runs out of stock. If you want to get one, please hurry as we won't make any more of them.

See you at the next product

To create a store we basically had to create a company inside our company, jumping across different projects without losing the focus. It's been a steep learning curve, but personally a very rewarding one.

I can finally announce with great pleasure that the oio store is now open for business, please have a look and let us know if you have any feedback in our Discord.

🍎 Stay chunky.

m