Apologies for the double email, we had an issue with our image hosting provider and some images were not visible in the original one, happy reading.

Hello oio!

You're currently reading the very first edition of the oio newsletter, where we post updates from our studio, short articles, and cool links from our Discord (not on the oio server? That's ok, join here).

First, we want to thank you for subscribing. We are honored that you're taking the time to read and reflect on what we have to say! If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends.

Second, we want to give you a short introduction to who we are, what we're up to, and what you can expect from our newsletter going forward.

We are oio - a creative company on a quest to turn emerging technologies into an approachable, everyday, and sustainable reality.

In broad and practical terms that means we work with ambitious companies to make sense of complex systems and make beautiful products with emerging technologies. In parallel, we also do self-initiated experiments and product builds that encapsulates our vision for what the future could and should look like.

Also, oio recently had its first birthday as it was born officially in the early times of 2020, founded by Matteo Loglio and Simone Rebaudengo.

Oio News! 🗞

Some updates about what's happening in our studio.

Welcome Markus!

Markus

The latest addition to the team is Markus Kilsgaard, who's joining as Head of Strategy. In addition to playing 70s kraut and ambient on oio.radio Markus makes sure that our projects land in places that are both feasible and viable. He's also spending time thinking about the future of oio and coordinating what new initiatives launch when. Before joining oio Markus was a business designer with Bow&Arrow in London and he's a former Olympic alpine skier too.

🤖 Meet Roby

Roby

Roby is our AI creative director and studio helper. It was born on our Discord server, where it keeps us entertained with jokes, wisdom and a casual game of ping pong. Recently it's grown out of discord and now lives on its own server, where it's making sense of the world through occasional outings on Instagram.

But Roby has big ambitions and is already starting to collaborate with us to come up with better ideas and products.

✏️ Call for interns!

call for interns

We launched our second call for interns last week, or as some friends pointed out, our Winterships. We are looking for young talents in the areas of Graphic Design and Front End development in London and Belgrade mostly but open for remote talent too.

If you are interested or know anyone that is, you can follow this link or share it

👉 apply here!

🏠 Studio update

We are now based out of a little house in East London, in a beautiful architectural experiment built in the former Broadcast Center for the London Olympics in 2012. You can have a look at the whole project here.

While unfortunately now we are still closed for external events, due to Covid issues, hopefully soon we will open for the public for some small events. The studio space is in development but we have already our flag in it...

🛠 Free AI workshop

Matteo is teaching an AI workshop for designers and creatives at the end of February, called "Untouched". It's part of a research project across SUPSI Lugano, ETH Zürich and Hongik University in Seoul.

The good news is that it's free of charge for participants, the bad news is that places are limited, so if you want to know more and apply, follow the link below.

👉 apply here!

⚡️ Oio Thoughts

Some updates on what's happening in our heads.

In the past months we have thought deep thoughts about creative AI + Human collaboration, some of which were the spark for Roby joining the team. Having worked in the field of bots + brains for years we're very excited to see it gaining momentum especially in the realm of generative text and images, but also more curious to see how this would affect the world of physical products that is very dear to us. We are constantly experimenting with ways to embed generative algorithms in our design process to enrich the final outputs and products. And without giving away to much we're proud to share that we'll soon launch our first product that deals with these topics.

In the meantime you can read a recent little essay that Simone wrote together with Nick Foster, about how the imperfections and roughness of algorithmic outputs can be an extremely interesting starting point for designing.

📖 On Distorsion by Simone Rebaudengo and Nick Foster

🌐 Oio Community Links

Over the past months, we opened up our Discord and invited a quite wide crowd from around the world. We are now around 135 people and here are some cool links cherrypicked for you from the community (not on Discord? Join now).