IRL Fashion and Other Physical Objects as a Blockchain Interface

Transcript

uh thanks for coming i'm uh i'm uli shannon deville and i'm a web 3 fashion designer and i don't make clothes for the metaverse but i make garments with a sewing machine that i then put on chain and that's just my side hustle my day job is actually building a technology that puts all kinds of physical goods on chain but today we're going to talk about fashion because i believe that it's a really powerful communications interface that can help all of our products uh become adopted and so i'm going to try to tell this in a three-part story titled fashioning the revolution with crypto couture for collective action it's a lot of words

so part one before we start i think we first need to acknowledge that web3 blockchain struggles with adoption i think if we left this building and went outside and asked just any random person on the street they would be challenged to actually define what a blockchain is um i think uh nfts are still confusing to people let alone the value of them and even worse i think that there's still a lot of distrust and fear in the technology and i think that this is because the media is controlling the narrative right now and i think that we need to take back the narrative by uh maybe not talking about what our products do but instead talking about why we're building them i think it's a

better way to connect with others who don't understand the technology right now so i'm going to connect these dots by taking us on a tour right now it's 1964 and we're in washington dc the capital of america of the united states um and we're waiting with 250 000 other people for martin luther king jr to give what would become his famous i have a dream speech and i want us just to look at this photo and notice two things just how many people are there how did they all arrive at this time on this date

nobody sent out invitations this was before twitter this was before telegram so how did everyone know to show up that's question number one question number two is why did people show up some many of the people in this photo they took a bus in very hot weather much like we have today on air conditioned bus uncomfortable and rode this bus for miles and miles across kilometers kilometers across large american states and some of the people in this photo even hitchhiked risking risking their safety so why did they do that well we might think it's because they went to see dr king speak but no one knew that this was going to become his

famous i have a dream speech and they also could have listened to it on the radio so the reason why i think they showed up and this was really the brilliance of dr king it's because he knew that to sell his product which his product was actually uh the civil uh sorry the the civil rights reform civil rights act to sell that he didn't need to talk about what it would do for people he needed to talk about why it mattered to him and by talking about why it mattered to him then others could connect with that why and they could realize that that's their dreams that they shared those dreams he said i believe i believe i dream i have a dream he didn't say i have a plan or i have a road map that's

how politicians talk he said i have a dream and so i think that this is important for us because right now in the space that we're all in the reason why we're all here i would say that we're probably all the innovators here building this space the early majority late majority that represents the mainstream where we see mainstream adoption and at the end the laggards are the people who will only use adopt a new technology if the old one is discontinued so you notice there's a break this is a very famous graph by uh everett rogers but that graph is sometimes referred to as the chasm and the question is how does that chasm get crossed and i believe it's of course the early adopters the early adopters are

uh all of your users who will put up with downtime who will uh put up with your kind of janky featureless app in the early days and the reason they do that is because they care about why you make it they care about the vision and the future that you're building it's the mainstream that actually cares about what you're making but really the early adopters to cross the chasm they have they care about why you make it and so communicating the why to them is really important so in summary to increase adoption we need to talk about the why we're building not what we're building part two of our story so if we agree that there's an adoption problem and we

agree that talking about why can help solve it then there's a question of how do we communicate the why and of course we can use twitter of course we can make videos of course we can use the about page on our website but i want to propose something maybe a little bit different and this is where the fashion comes in so to do that i'm going to take us back to dr king and this time in the photo notice what everyone is wearing it's a hot summer day in august and they're wearing suits tailored suits in america we call it sunday's best they're church clothes why are they wearing these you might think because people are making speeches we need to look formal but in fact in every rally every protest

tailored suits were worn every day this is rosa parks on a bus wearing a tailored jacket and the message that this delivered was i deserve dignity i deserve respect and true rosa parks could have put this on a sign and held it up at a protest but maybe just by wearing the clothes she was wearing that demanded dignity and respect it's more subtle but maybe it's more of a powerful way to communicate and it's not just tailored suits but denim was also a big part of the civil rights reform denim was to say remember plantations this is what we wore as slaves in plantations and of course the black panthers leather

jackets berets the message here was we're ready to fight and when you walk into a room and you see someone else wearing a leather jacket and a beret you know that you're part of the same tribe you know that you're both ready to fight and this isn't just civil rights in america this is the zapatistas from mexico uh indigenous clothing with balaclavas balaclava is because the leader marco believed anyone could be the leader so everyone would wear a balaclava and everyone could be the voice of this movement it was about shared values and of course riot very influenced by the zapatistas this is a riot or sorry a march in chile about

for sexual assault safety for women of course anonymous and the vagina hats from the women's march in in the u.s and this isn't a new phenomenon it's not recent this is from the eighteen hundreds laissez this is a french movement wearing the most outrageous outfits they openly rebelled against the social norms and rules established by the french republic so this has been going on for a long time fashion has been used to express values to express the why of course black lives matter trayvon martin and here back to france the giles jean and i live in france i live about two hours from here and i bought a car last

year and when i opened up the trunk and i found my yellow vest i actually understood what this movement meant without being a part of it it's like oh i have access to a yellow vest this what they're fighting for could affect me and i can be a part of it so i believe that to increase adoption we need to meet people where they're at we need to find familiar things everyday things because wallets exchanges are not familiar self-sovereignty these concepts transparency they're not familiar so to connect to help others connect to these concepts we need to talk about them and why we care about them and then connect it to something that's recognizable so just this is some of my own work as a fashion designer this is a collection

called for the daughters of the witches you didn't burn the video won't play but basically it's a garment when you scan the tag um it uh plays a really cute ar video um and then it validates the authenticity with an nft um this is another example and what i was interested in was what does it look like if we're not using everyday clothes but if we intentionally design clothes for these movements to express our values so when the us space force launched this uniform i made this counter uniform to represent space piece maybe i can play these videos actually so here's the garment and then here's the

sorry the ar so they just have a little piece of delight on them so i like to call this is what i call fashioning the revolution i think that fashion is a really subtle yet powerful tool to express why we're doing things so part three now that we've talked about the why let's talk about the what what are you building how do you talk about what you're building and how do you decide what to build so we'll return one last time to dr king and this time talk about his speech so we know it as the i have a dream speech but in fact it used to be called its first title was normalcy never again

and it's because his speech writers thought that i have a dream was too trite it was too obvious and the whole first half of the speech if you read it it uses these terms like promissory note bad check insufficient funds banks and this is because the civil rights act was very much about equal opportunity employment and you need a job so the first half of the speech was about communicating needs but there was a moment where dr king went rogue he put down a speech there was a gospel singer who said tell us your dream and i this i'm imagining this i like to think that

uh the night before this is true statement actually the night before he met with this gentleman his 15 year old kid robert avery who was brutally beaten by the police with a cattle prod in alabama and he hitchhiked to get to the dr king rally um and dr king sat down with him and talked to him for 20 minutes and he didn't ask him what do you need he asked him what are your dreams what do you dream of and so that's when he put down his pre-scripted speech and made what became his very famous i have a dream speech and i use that as an example to talk about when we design products i think product the world of product design kind of

started with designing for the needs of technology but then user-centered design taught us no we should actually be designing for the needs of users not the technology but what i want to challenge here is that user-centered design assumes that users are rational and users tell you what they actually need when i think in reality we should be asking what do you want not what you need what do you want what do you desire and that's what dr king did with a speech you need a paycheck but you want equality you want these other more conceptual things so maybe you need a wallet but you

are sorry yeah you need a wallet but maybe you actually want and desire and care about self-sovereign identity and owning your own data and concepts like this and just to give a couple more examples so maybe we need to vote on proposals quickly in our dow but what i want is maybe to grow my social influence in the dow so then maybe that helps us reprioritize the features that we build from easy voting to social tokens for rewarding for participation or if you ask a user uh maybe these kind of old-school car companies if they ask users what do you need in a car they might say i need a more fuel-efficient engine

but if you ask them what they want they might say i want to look like a boss when i arrive places and uber was created you arrive in a black car and so it has i think using i want has the power to reprioritize features but also potentially even create new industries and uh here's just a couple of examples so uh i know a man he's 60 years old he doesn't know anything about nfts or blockchain but he knows a lot about wine and so i made this little this little thing up for him when he corks the wine he gets to see this little animation and it mints an nft and now fast forward he has a wallet his friends have wallets they they they all want corks with little characters on

them and so i think it's a really interesting way of meeting him where he's at to help him sign up for a wallet and begin his journey in this space and then just another example a teenage teenage girl for her birthday i made uh this little i bought her a compact makeup compact and made this animation and same thing when you open it and scan it it mints the nft and suddenly she's flexing in high school she's like the most popular kid in her school and they all want nfts and they've signed up for wallets and they're researching and you know she went on youtube and learned how to do this by herself how to set up a wallet so i

think just inspiring inspiring users by meeting them where they're at is a way that we can increase adoption so design around desires not needs and just in summary remembering the way dr king conducted and delivered his speech we number one we should communicate the why to we should meet users where they're at and i believe that building on-ramps uh to to all of our products uh using irl physical things is a way to do that and design around desires and thank you that's the end i would just say make fashion make the physical a part of your tech stack thank you so

in web 3 what do you propose or what's what you believe in well i think it's a really powerful technology i mean blockchain nfts i think they're really powerful and they represent a lot of the values that i care about things like decentralization and self-sovereign identities and transparency i believe in these things so i think for me as a fashion designer it's my way to contribute to this world and i think anyone who is building a product just imagine kind of what could be the very front end of that stack and can it be just the everyday objects that we have in our world could that be like the very first touch point of your product

thank you thank you very much