Carbon Banks explores how the blockchain could build a more sustainable relationship with our furniture and save it from ending up in landfills prematurely. In partnership with WINT Design Lab, SPACE10 imagines how a physical, wooden chair could be connected to a generative digital asset on the blockchain to create an emotional bond that would incentivise us to keep, repair, trade, and recycle our furniture. The digital asset takes the shape of a personalised tree, beginning as a seedling and developing over time in parallel to the furniture’s lifespan. The longer the chair is kept and cared for, the wilder, lusher, and more unique the tree would grow. 1: The user purchases a new piece of furniture 2: Upon scanning the uniquely patterned piece of furniture, a virtual tree is minted as a seedling and rooted to the chair 3: The longevity of the furniture is mirrored in the uniquely evolving asset 4: The tree is a new form of digital expression 5. Becomes an inherited sentimental asset

The current climate crisis demands that we consider all the tools and technologies at our disposal to move towards more sustainable systems, products, services, and behaviours. The Carbon Bank chairs are made out of wood, acting as a ‘carbon sink’, and storing carbon for as long as the furniture is in use. For this project, we look at how emerging concepts of phygital ownership, scarcity and amplification could be used towards sustainable furniture consumption. We hope by linking the possessions in our homes with those in our increasingly mixed realities that it would provide us with opportunities to relate differently to our material world.

Carbon Banks would provide a digital testament to how you treat your physical furniture, creating a dynamic, responsive and personalised visualisation of specific actions. In a future where more and more of our time is spent moving between physical and digital realities, Carbon Banks re-imagines how digital life can directly impact our relationship with our possessions, expand the influence of our physical belongings, and even give us a new way to express ourselves online. We tend to forget that we're in the very early stages of these advanced technologies, and as it evolves, so will new opportunities to re-think how we can use it for good. Carbon Banks has the ability to improve our relationship with the planet, by thinking more circular, and finding new ways to encourage us to keep, repair, trade, and recycle our furniture.