Making artifacts from the pluriverse: ancient vessels reimagined for digital futures
About the Project
Kintsugi Upgrades is an NFT collection created in-house at Card79, aimed at capturing the studio’s speculative design ethos. The project revives scanned historical vessels, digitally fractures them, then reconstructs and augments them using the metaphor of traditional kintsugi—melding ancient and futuristic sensibilities into new virtual artifacts.
Project Brief
Translate Card79’s belief in combining strategy, aesthetics, and future thinking into a visual collection. Each artifact needed to feel both historical and technologically forward—something that belongs to an alternate future (the multiverse or pluriverse), rather than our present.
Key Challenges
Digitally merging old and new with visual plausibility We began with 3D scans of real ancient artifacts. The challenge was to fracture them, then enhance features in a way that feels futuristic yet believable—embodying both historical weight and speculative possibility.
Expressing studio philosophy through form These NFTs weren’t just digital products, but visual expressions of Card79’s design values. Every render had to speak to the tension between past cultural artifacts and imagined future upgrades.
Inventing new function in purely virtual objects The artifacts don’t exist in the physical world, and their "upgrades" imply technologies that don't yet exist. Balancing that ambiguity was essential: each design had to feel meaningful without physical context.
Process
Step 1: Scanning and “excavation” Sourced public-domain scans of ancient vessels from historical museum archives. These digital “artifacts” served as the raw material for speculation.
Step 2: Digital shattering and selection We shattered each model virtually and selected fragments to upgrade—choosing which pieces to keep, which to replace, and where to insert futurist modifications.
Step 3: Futuristic augmentation and kintsugi We “upgraded” vessels by adding high-tech functionality—like nano-like interfaces or speculative tools—visually “mended” with digital kintsugi seams rendered in gold-textured blending.
Step 4: Rendering and NFT minting Each upgraded artifact was rendered as a collectible NFT, ready for blockchain minting and presentation in digital galleries.
Outcome
One of the first industrial‑design NFT artifact collections Among the earliest NFTs created by a design studio, Kintsugi Upgrades drew international attention as a speculative expression beyond conventional product design.
Award‑winning speculative vision Recognized with a Core77 Speculative Design honorable mention, Indigo Gold Award, and shortlist mentions from Fast Company IBD and BOLD Awards for pushing the discipline into new realms
Artifacts that belong to another world Each piece feels like a digital relic from an alternate future—grounded in history, reimagined through design, and meaningful in virtual contexts.
Curious about creative work beyond product reality?
Let’s explore how design can exist in virtual worlds—bridging past and future through thoughtful speculative form.
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