The New Creative Economies
Social developments in the lifestyle arena are calling for a unified technological answer.
The contemporary creative economies are characterized by a transgression of traditional disciplines and reality dimensions. We see the world of fashion, design, luxury, and media continuously converging. Lifestyle markets have become fragmented, fuelled by consumers’ complex desire to fulfil their unique identity, and by their resentment to fit categorical catch-all-labels.
At the same time, the boundaries between the physical and digital spheres of creative expression are similarly overcome. The material aspect of sociality is dissolving: a continuing dissemination of personal avatars, digital collectibles, and virtual representations in social media, VR spaces, and online games is about to create a whole array of new economies in the socio-creative communities.
These economies are grounded on a modernized understanding of lifestyle consumption. In our contemporary environment, consumers wish to buy into immersive experiences instead of just purchasing products. They hope that their belongings give them access to communities instead of just their ownership. They prefer their items to be unique instead of just exclusive, and personalized instead of just customized.
In this context, the effect of technological progress and adoption is twofold. On the one hand, technology is empowering creators to unleash their creative force in unprecedented ways. The emerging genres of computer-generated imagery and digital-only fashion are becoming an integral part of lifestyle production. For the first time, designers are unconstrained by the boundaries of the physical world. In every respect, lifestyle houses are becoming increasingly technology-driven.
On the other hand, technology has also empowered modern consumers. The millennial and Gen Z generations are savvy digital natives, demanding, and in charge as no customer cohort has been before them. Technology allows them to access an abundant amount of information and to create narratives that have become the first point of reference for their peer communities.
While the silhouettes of these modern creative economies are clearly visible today, a number of key challenges have come to light. They revolve around the ways in which we deal with digital ownership, capture its value, and enable widespread participation in the cultural conversation. To leverage on technological and social progressions, the space is in need of a shared digital ecosystem that they can use as a base layer for their cooperation and collaboration.
LUKSO powers and secures systems of trusted cooperation in the modern creative economies.
The LUKSO network is purposefully built for the nature of the modern lifestyle industry. It enables the space to drive innovation around the core themes of future creative work. This includes the ways in which creators coordinate their communities and projects, engage with consumers and collaborators, automate their interactions, and trust their transactions. It redefines how assets can be managed, collections showcased, and brands experienced. It is the technological playground for creative professionals to shape emerging trends and unleash their creative force.
LUKSO is part of a vivid superordinate ecosystem. It brings different worlds together that for the most part have had difficulties to interact with each other effectively, or that have even been largely disconnected. This includes creators and consumers, influencers and designers, investors and technology innovators. Present and future interactions among and between all of these stakeholders can now be embedded into a dynamic decentralized digital layer that is transparent, verifiable, interoperable and secured by hard-coded rules.
The modern lifestyle system is powered by peer production and collective creatorship. LUKSO opens up new access channels between socio-creative crowds and expands their physical, digital and virtual touch points across all creative verticals, platforms, and professions.
LUKSO’s wide range of applicability is guided by three key principles: identification, virtualization, and tokenization.
The trinity of LUKSO’ key principles allows to connect integrate physical and digital product dimensions further, to strengthen the individual experiences with and around them, and to build strongly relational communities. As a holistic approach, this allows information, value, and ownership to flow freely within and between them.
Identification is a process of giving everything and everyone in the digital lifestyle ecosystem a unique digital identity. Blockchain-based identities on the LUKSO network are self-sovereign, which means that their owners have full control over their digital selves and the data that is attached to them. They are also permanent, portable, platform-agnostic, and interoperable and thus allow users to maintain their personal reputation universally. For creators, such as brands, aspiring designers, or influencers, publicly curated identities can foster transparency, whilst public validation will protect their name. For users, universal blockchain-based IDs lead to greater convenience, control, and continuity of their digital identities and the connected reputation they have accrued over time. By using RFID-chips, digital identities can be created for physical objects, which makes them ‘phygital’ items with a unique product ‘DNA’. Digital ownership of real-life goods allows their owners to authenticate them, interact with them, and explore their individual history, which can be recorded over time. For digital-only collectibles, establishing singularity through identity is a crucial next step; only when ownership structures are clearly defined and manageable can these items be identifiable, accessible, storable, and transferable.
Virtualization is a process that is used to transfer the properties of physical products to virtual spaces, to expand the realms of their ownership, and to establish a seamless connection between all dimensions of users’ self-presentations, perceptions, and experiences. We call this convergence a ‘phygital’ progression. With ‘phygitals’, users can uncover unified narratives around their physical and digital products and carry them around different realities whilst preserving their specific context.
Tokenization is a process of converting all sorts of rights into custom-built tokens that can represent value, capture assets, signal status, or prove loyalty. Tokens give the ability to make such rights fungible, shareable, and transferrable while at the same time being highly versatile and customisable. The customizability of tokens means that creative professionals are free to decide upon their functionality, overall supply, target recipients, name, and branding. Around the ownership of such tokens, vibrant communities can form, where real value can freely flow between all participants and convey trends in real time. In many ways, token economies can be used to strengthen customer experiences, commitments, and relationships. Through their accessibility, security, and transparency, lifestyle communities can also apply their tokens to participate in mass-crowd voting. We call this procedure ‘communitization’.
These core components can mutually support each other and together form the blueprints for all kinds of new and peer-to-peer economies in the lifestyle, fashion, and design verticals.
Most applications of the LUKSO blockchain will draw on different combinations of them. Used together, they can attach new meanings to the definitions of value, participation, and ownership in the creative space.
More on LUKSO, read our Blueprint: https://bit.ly/30bW5VC
