In 2023, I embarked on a hands-on “maker” journey in tech and creativity with the goal of expanding my knowledge and tech skills with Web3 projects and experiences. I participated in several immersive learning opportunities from coding in a hackathon and Web3 developer relations to conceptualising, creating and hosting a series of Fusion Talks, having rich conversations with people in Web3 to finishing 2023 on a high with other women in Shefi S9.

In mid-2023, I crossed paths with Josh Howard during the Thirdweb Learn pilot cohort. Thirdweb was introduced to me when I participated in the Ready Player 3 | thirdweb’s Web3 Gaming hackathon early in 2023. It was the first time I coded in a game hackathon. I learned alot and made some amazing new friends.

Josh introduced his latest project, Art Locatia, a cool Web3 App empowering artists to showcase their work on the Polygon blockchain, while giving explorers and fans a way to view their art through augmented reality (AR) on their mobile devices. I recognised that it behaved like “Pokemon Go!” but with the blockchain for ownership and transactions. He was inspired by real life art projects he discovered in his local neighbourhood and used the thirdweb sdk to craft this digital concept. I got to know him because he was always willing to answer my questions about technology and coding for my own NFT project.

I love art in all shapes and forms, from legends Monet and Van Gogh to one of my favourite print artist, the late Dietrich Varez from Hawai’i, to David Best’s temples at Burning Man. I practice my art skills as a hobby. As Josh shared his project work, I could imagine how this idea could be useful to museums even untraditional ones such as the Waiheke Island art walk, to Burning Man, when fans can support their artist to build their desert art installations, or maybe something fun and wholesome like a friendly scavenger hunt among family and friends, combing through their neighbourhood looking for art through augmented reality. I just liked the idea. And always chatted with Josh about his work and ask him questions to learn coding things.

After completing Thirdweb Learn, we joined season 4 of Buildspace to cultivate our individual projects. Each week, the founder of Buildspace shared insightful stories about iterating ideas and the valuable lessons that shaped the Buildspace project.

These stories included:

- exploring your idea and setting small, tangible goals,

- seeking feedback from others through social media,

- adapting ideas based on feedback,

- then presenting your refined project to the massive cohort, make connections and take further steps.

These steps resonated with my design process. This framework enables you to align with your time constraints, explore many ideas quickly, and challenge yourself. Josh dug in and took Art Locatia to the next level, while I delved into Fusion Talks — a series of conversations with people I’ve met on my Web3 journey. Together we unpack our origin stories, what we are doing in Web3, what we have learned and what we are doing next.

The turning point came when Josh joined me for his Fusion Talk to share his adventures in Web3 and the outcomes from his Buildspace project for Art Locatia. Little did I know, this Fusion Talk would spark a collaborative journey and allow me to share my design skills and human journey of a hobby artist to the blockchain world.

To prepare for his Fusion Talk, I prepared my own piece of traditional art for Art Locatia. One of the challenges for me was learning Blender to make 3D models. Blender has a rich tool set to make pretty much anything, especially animation, but when you are new to it, it feels overwhelming and complex. I needed it to take a digital copy of my 2d acrylic painting and transform it into a 3D *glb model. I work on my Windows machine, so trying to make a model for Apple iOS, was not simple to do but Josh helped me out.

Another challenge was managing the many steps to get my art prepared and onto the Blockchain using thirdweb dashboard. Up until this time, I was using thirdweb SDK to deal with wallets or using NFTs to claim and play a game, but now I’m making ERC1155 contracts and adding my art to it through a JSON file. There wasn’t anything insurmountable, but it is important to understand the end-to-end process to avoid mistakes and find efficiencies in the process. And learning takes time. After I successfully saw my artwork on the Art Locatia test map, I felt accomplished and ready to share.😍

When I unpacked my novice journey and challenges of the 3D models with Josh, he reasoned that offering a Studio feature to help new artists traverse these key steps could be useful especially with blockchain and smart contacts. If you are an artist that is already comfortable making NFTs for the blockchain, the process made sense and was straightforward to execute. But if you’re new, this Studio feature could be tremendously helpful.

Using wireframes as part of the ideation process and invite meaningful conversations.

My collaboration includes using my UX research skills to describe my art journey, identify potential hiccups and ideate wireframes in Figma for Josh to consider in the Art Locatia Studio feature. It helped us to use our time wisely for decision making and next steps. We took pragmatic heuristic steps to give an artist an easy flow to make the NFT JSON file needed by other parts of the process. Even with our busy schedules full of our responsibilities and living in different parts of the world, we found ways to keep in touch over time, even if it was making videos or just chatting on discord to share statuses and updates.

After Josh coded a prototype for Art Locatia Studio, I leveraged my “Dev Rel” experience to contribute to its product documentation, starting with a draft version for feedback before using markup, javascript and git skills on Docusaurus for the production version. One of the things I appreciate about the collaboration is that Josh grew to trust my skills and he appreciates my contributions. He’s very generous with his time and knowledge when we catch up.

Now that we are in 2024, I’m anticipating the results of collaboration come together for Art Locatia and Studio. As a UX researcher, I would love to follow up with other artists and fans to ask questions to understand how they used the Studio feature to get their art on the blockchain. I would be keen to know their ideas for Art Locatia and I wonder if there’s other exemplars making similar projects for artists.

- I imagine that Art Locatia could be a fun app to use at an art event where we walk around to view art installations, and use the app to see more info and make transactions, like buying a t-shirt at the giftshop at the end of the walk.

- A way to sponsor art from favourite artists for an event like Burning Man. And buy an NFT after the event. Perhaps camps can use it for pre-playa fundraising and on-playa events.

- Looking back at a scavenger hunt I created for my tech colleagues on a Friday work event, and wonder how this could be used for that scavenger hunt. I think they would have loved the tech of it.

- And I think the types of artwork could be other than a 3D model, maybe a song or an animation or movie.

But it would be neat to find out and grow my coding skills and contributions, starting with using Art Locatia Studio and make my artwork accessible in Art Locatia.

Cheers,