Digital Originals — Living virtual garments as cultural reflectors.
Everyone’s got a story to tell. So in The Mill’s Experience Team we’re building custom tools to express individual experiences through physical and virtual clothing. Not just for high-profile football players, but for all of us.
Earlier this year, The Mill Experience Team was asked to create a unique garment. Well, actually several unique garments. The creatives at Saatchi and Saatchi behind the Hope United football team were looking for a new way to talk about the online hate and abuse aimed at their players. The idea was to move the murky world of online hate, with its anonymous social media accounts spewing bile at the athletes, out of the shadows and into the public view as data art. We’d monitor the players’ social media accounts, identify and quantify abusive messages, and create a system that would turn this data into designs for the players’ shirts. We’d also measure the hopeful comments, the positivity, love and loyalty from the players’ supporters. Each player would get a unique shirt illustrating their experience of anti-black, anti-female and anti-LGB hatred and the hope that was pushing back.
We at The Mill are artists, technologists and thinkers. But we’re not data scientists or sociologists. We knew it was imperative to shore up our design work with solid knowledge of online hate. So our first step in the project was to find a partner. We discovered HateLab, a team based at Cardiff University that specialises in discovering and assessing online abuse. Our relationship with HateLab and its founder Dr Matthew Williams turned out to be much more than a simple supplier partnership. Matt Williams opened our eyes to the realities of online abuse and how to combat it. He taught us how to understand the data, how best to search it out and how to represent it. We took this learning into our design process and we think the whole project is stronger for it.
With spreadsheets from HateLab we designed a generative art application to turn numbers into images. Artist/developer Seph Li worked with Mill Design Director Will MacNeil to build a system that could express the hate and hope contained in the numbers as powerful images illustrating the intensity of the social media dialog. As each player’s data set came in, a new design was automatically generated and reformatted to create the front and back of their shirt. The application can now respond whenever a new dataset is provided. This could be used for a huge range of online and offline applications for exploring and combating abuse on social media.
With the Women’s European Championship set to start in July, the Hope United Team focussed their attention on anti-female hate. The Hope United sponsors, EE, launched a campaign about sexist abuse aimed at female players, and how men could work to combat it. EE created a long form TV commercial based on the female players in the Hope United Squad, an outdoor media campaign and an online hub to educate visitors about sexism online. The Mill’s shirt design featured at the centre of the campaign. For us it’s been a rewarding journey of learning, creating and storytelling.
But this process isn’t limited to famous football players and large scale campaigns. We want to take this idea of customisation and personal storytelling and make it available to every single person who wants to share their lives and experiences. To see where we’re going, please read on!
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Here’s a simple question that probably isn’t simple at all. What’s your favourite thing in the world? Leaving aside people and pets, what do you love? Is it something tangible like a sweater someone knitted for you, a letter from a great friend or a photo of your child? Or perhaps something you can’t really own like a piece of music or a place you visit? Then ask yourself this: would anyone else love it as much as you or in the way you do? Or is it your personal link to the object, and the stories and memories that come with it, that make it profoundly yours to love? Here at The Mill, we’re looking at what makes things valuable to us. Because a revolution in the way we acquire and own things is coming.
Professional content creators are, by definition, concerned about ownership. After all, if the things they make are to have financial value, the makers have to control how these items are bought and sold, or copied and distributed. So the producers limit the supply of the content they make in order to increase its value. If, for example, The Mandalorian were on free-to-air TV, no one would pay for a streaming service to watch it. As consumers, we’re well versed in contracts of service and ownership like this. But of course these agreements only work if the content creators are able to maintain control of the product or service. We’ve already seen what happens when someone finds a loophole. The advent of BitTorrent enabled file sharing services like Napster to circumvent the music recording industry’s model of buying and selling physical copies of music and sent the business into chaos. It took nearly a decade for the dust to settle. When it did, it revealed a new economic landscape: we rarely buy music now. Instead we subscribe to it.
This matters because we are fast approaching a revolution in social media: the Metaverse. Brands and platforms are scrambling to find ways to move our historical consumer habits, such as walking through a mall and buying a pair of trainers, into another dimension where the mall is virtual and the trainers are digital assets. When it comes to owning those assets, which could be anything from clothing and accessories to music, art, animation or 3D game characters, we’re most definitely in a period of flux, with creators searching out ways to designate ownership of their work in order to make it sellable.
It’s practically impossible to limit the sharing of a digital file, but it is in theory possible to document who actually owns the intellectual property. Enter non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are meant to allow artists to mint limited editions of digital creations as tokens on cryptocurrency blockchains. In turn these tokens can be bought and sold and creators can be paid for their work. But NFTs and the platforms that sell them are struggling with the simple fact that digital assets are easy to copy and share and extremely difficult to lock up in a vault. Theft in the NFT world is rampant. Artists have seen their work minted by strangers. Art buyers have been duped into buying ‘counterfeit’ works. And, perhaps the biggest flaw with NFTs, the tokens themselves don’t contain the digital file, just a link to it. If the server that the NFT links to goes offline, the token potentially becomes worthless. Throw in the volatility of the cryptocurrency world and the energy intensive process of mining coins and minting NFTs and the story just gets worse. Solutions will come, but for now NFTs are problematic.
So how do we sidestep the problem? We think the issue is in the false notion of scarcity. The whole premise of digital content is that it’s easily copied and shared. Why try to work against the fundamental strength of digital media? Where NFTs encourage a market of exclusive art at high costs and at high risk, we’re looking at doing the opposite and creating unique, customised objects that anyone can own and share freely. Our aim is simple: create digital and physical objects that have value not because they’re exclusive, expensive or difficult to acquire, but because they’re crafted for and by the people who want them. In other words, we’re going to make things that people genuinely love. And if they love what they make, they’ll probably feel pretty good about the brands that helped them make them.
This journey started for us several years ago with a unique project for Ford Mustang and AKQA. We built a web application that allowed Mustang enthusiasts to craft unique versions of the Mustang Pony emblem. These designs could then be reproduced in anything from a 3D printed badge mounted on a car to large format billboard advertising. As far as the user was concerned, the design process was simple and fun. They just played with the web app until they had something they liked enough to want to share. On the distribution side, things were similarly easy. Even though the system was able to produce a huge amount of custom content, managing it was relatively simple. At the heart of the web app was a procedural design system that expressed the users’ creations through a simple series of numbers. Creating the various outputs just required passing these numbers to the appropriate printing system (whether it be conventional printing or 3D). The end users were rewarded with something they crafted themselves.
We feel we’re seeing a new world of opportunities to craft custom digital and physical objects at scale. Behind the scenes, Mill artists have been diving deeper into customisation systems. Design Director Will MacNeil has been exploring data-driven artworks. His D’istral project links to a weather API and creates unique digital paintings based on the past or present weather in any city. Users simply enter a place and time and a unique painting appears. Will has expanded this system to ingest a much wider range of data inputs such as colour palettes scraped from Instagram accounts, or exercise data from a wearable. Want to create a painting based on the day you ran the marathon? We can do it. Or shoes embroidered with the colours from your holiday in Greece. We can do it.
We’re now exploring how this customisation might work with fashion brands. We’re looking at how we can take an existing piece of popular fashion design such as a North Face Down Vest and create meaningful alterations to customise the design and create digital assets. In time, users will take these digital garments with them into the Metaverse. Sports merchandise is another strong market for digital customisation. We’re researching systems to merge team fanbase data with sports attire. How many matches have you attended at Old Trafford? We’ll make a digital piece of clothing that beautifully illustrates your loyalty to Manchester United.
The interface for customisation could move well beyond the typical configurator we see currently. Users could be allowed to input anything they like from data sources like wearables or key dates to photographs, music, anything really. The creation process could take on much more than data input. We’re looking at using pose estimation to design a procedurally generated abstract outfit around your shape.
At the heart of this exploration is our concern about data ownership. While they may not realise it yet, most of the people we currently call consumers have in fact become the product. Their personal information is acquired, processed and bought and sold daily. In many cases, behind the wonderful connectedness offered by social media platforms is a well-concealed contract that grants the platforms an enviable bargain. Users get the benefit of well developed communications tools while the platforms extract an ever-growing stash of personal data that can be sold and traded.
We want to see a shift in this economy where users become masters of their own personal data. To start this process we want people to see how rich and valuable their personal data is. We think one way to do this is encourage them to interact with this information and use it to create personalised content. We see this as a benefit for both customers and brands. Brands will see a revolution in the way their customers interact with their products. And customers will find new ways to tell their own stories with the help of the brands they love.
