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We are one.

Over the last century, we have achieved considerable progress on some of the most pressing humanitarian challenges, such as eradicating infectious diseases and making life more convenient through market-based approaches to technology, finance, and law. But in our pursuit of efficiency, growth and productivity, we have often put our tools and methods to use with little regard to their systemic or long-term effects, creating a set of new, interconnected, and more complex problems. Our recent issues require new approaches: new understanding, solution design and intervention. Yet we continue to try to solve these new problems with the same tools that caused them.

We need more than SDG badges and simple impact measures to progress against our pressing, complex problems — climate change, economic instability and political polarization. We need a new sensibility and a new architecture. This new architecture must incorporate the complexity of our times with the social and technical trends that are the backdrop of our economic and social activity — web3 and AI are the most current foci of our attention.

Digital Architecture Lab (DAL) was built to address this challenge. Founded in 2022, DAL is a group of multi-disciplinary designers and “doers” developing a new digital sensibility suited for our future’s challenging but pro-social scenario. Our mission is to participate in and contribute to a new sensibility expressed as a new digital architecture with expressions in technology, norms, laws and business. We will work with the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society unbounded by traditional silos and boundaries.

But why architecture? Because it’s the meta-discipline that best suits the antidisciplinary challenge we face. Architecture synthesizes engineering, design, art, and science to go beyond mere digitization of existing structures — For instance, how should identity work when we have a public decentralized blockchain, encryption and security requirements? What does education look like in the age of ChatGPT? The Bauhaus movement introduced new materials like industrial-scale concrete, steel and glass, and created skyscrapers and airports, changing the sensibilities of our time. This time, we must rethink what we can and should build in light of new digital materials such as the web, blockchain, and AI to inform paradigm shifts in our aesthetics and societal architecture.

Digital architecture represents a new sensibility expressed as technology, law, norms, and markets responsive to new materials and our new challenges — the environment, societal inequities and systemic instability. The values of this new sensibility include inclusiveness, sustainability, and diversity, as reflected in our logo design.

Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi and our team have developed a new aesthetic that embodies the values of the Digital Architecture Lab, giving shape to the Lab’s distinct ethos and approach.

Reflecting our belief in dynamic, empowered communities of diverse individuals, soft pixels create new structures, moving together in harmonized flows of gradients, while maintaining their individual hues and twists.

(Here’s the pentagram blog post for those who want to know more.)

Concretely, we work with startups, large corporations, and the government to produce media content, conduct research, engage with communities, and drive government reform.

Some of our ongoing projects:

Crypto Cafe & Bar
Based in Ebisu, Tokyo, our NFT membership-based crypto bar will serve as a hub for the web3 community in Japan. We aim to create a global crypto bar network by partnering with other crypto bars worldwide.

Probabilistic Programs
In collaboration with the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project, we are developing accessible tools to empower non-programmers with AI tools for data science and to enhance transparency, accountability, and interpretability of the data web3 and the digitization of society are making available.

web3 Workshops
We are working with institutions and companies to develop an architecture that uses web3 to program businesses and society to be more efficient, effective, accountable and interpretable. We empower corporate executives and staff to understand and adopt web3 technologies through hands-on workshops.

The New Context Conference
A conference hosted by DG that is held annually to share knowledge about emerging technologies and their impact on society.

As part of the larger Digital Garage ecosystem, DAL brings together our network of experts and builders to implement our vision of the future. As we believe in the power of collective action through communities, we hope our blog posts to serve as a platform to spark conversations.

We invite you to join us in the conversation!