My name's Ren, and I'm the founder of Senspace, a Web3 product studio building fun, onchain toys with our local creative community in Tokyo.
We take a break from our usual programming here to share a workshop that I recently ran at a new shopping facility in the center of Harajuku called Harakado. Harakado hasn't actually opened yet, but we were lucky enough to get the opportunity to host an event as part of its "pre-opening" series at, Baby The Coffee Brew Club, a new café and creator space on the third floor of the facility. Baby The Coffee Brew Club has close relationships with several "physical world" creators and curators, but invited us to bring some tech-driven creativity into their space.
The workshop was called "Imagine the Future," which to be quite honest might have been a bit hyperbolic, but it let me create this crazy flyer in Dall-E of Harajuku 500 years in the future :). The goal of the workshop was for participants to not only imagine what the world might feel like with greater adoption of AI and NFTs, but to also touch and feel AI and NFTs to think about how they might fit into their day-to-day lives.
We started with a talk from myself, 3D and AI artist, Denjin-K, and Senspace CTO, Ryoma to discuss how we were using AI in our creative careers today and how NFTs served as a delivery mechanism for our creativity. Considering the audience was a lot of Tokyo streetwear scene folks, the idea of being able to take an idea and turn it into a product in seconds by creating in AI -> distributing NFTs and the new "sticker culture" developing around free mints seemed to strike a cord with folks listening.
I personally like to compare grabbing someone's free mint to having the same value as going to your friend's streetwear pop up. Buying something at the pop up can be expensive and is a fairly big ask, but going to your friend's pop up will also cost ¥400-500 by train roundtrip ($2-3 or so), which is exactly about the price of a free mint. Taking the time to go to a friend's pop up is also a much higher signal action than a like or a share on social media, similar to how I feel about minting.
We then went ahead and took everybody through Zora canvas and the Imagine feature. As someone who doesn't have any hard creative skills, I've been using this workflow for the last few months and have really enjoyed it. After sharing my Seen today in Tokyo series, we talked through some prompts and made some ridiculous images haha.
After that Denjin-K, presented his short art film, Clover, a large portion of which was made in AI using Midjourney and Runway. Denjin took us through how he made the film and then we tasked the audience to imagine and mint the next chapter using Zora canvas.
You can mint Clover by Denjin-K below!
We got everyone to download Rainbow wallets to start the session, which was great as you don't need to set up Zora on your wallet to operate on the Zora network and also sent everyone some Zora ETH to access the Imagine feature, mint their own NFT and collect other people's NFTs.
Despite the fact that everyone was supposed to imagine the next chapter, people were having too much fun using Imagine that most people just ended up making whatever they wanted. That's half of the fun though :).
See some of the pieces below, all made in Zora Canvas using the Imagine feature!
We had everyone post the links to their pieces on the IG post for the event, so they could check them out afterwards and collect them too! You can check everybody's art out below as well!
Check the comments on this post here.
After we all laughed and shared our art, we called it a night! Onboarded 20 new users successfully, all while having fun!
Some of my key takeaways below:
Rainbow is a really nice first wallet when onboarding folks. Not having to add networks to your wallet, bridge in wallet is a life saver. The branding is also approachable for new, creative users.
We initially didn't know you needed Zora ETH to use Zora's imagine feature (as the operating team all hard Zora ETH in our wallets). This is definitely a barrier to entry for new minters.
Outside of needing the initial ETH though, the UX is very smooth going from Imagine->Mint. Some of the participants already minted additional pieces on their own after the event 😀 .
Posting links to IG was great for this event, but you need a place to share your NFTs with people who get them. I ended up onboarding a couple of folks onto Warpcast afterwards too as a place to find community around their art.
If you made it this far, appreciate your bearing with me! Look forward to keeping you posted on more cool stuff that we're up up to in Tokyo again soon!
