As a studio, we are guided by our curiosity around futuristic technology, and a dedication to approaching design problems with empathy, poetry, and mysticism. We are constantly striving to better define who we are, to better shape the world around us. Aligning ourselves with a true sense of optimism and purpose is what drives us to constantly explore new depths of innovation. It is what allows us to see further into the future.
Our studio is inspired to look into the future based on events in the past. Back in the 1950’s, our founder Afshin Mehin’s grandfather, Hormozd, made a name for himself as a talented palm reader in his small town in Iran. Although he was first and foremost known for his palm reading skills, he always kept around a curious set of round fortune telling cards, called the Ganjifa. They were covered in suits and characters Afshin had never seen before on playing cards, and instead of 52 cards, there were 78 in total; 78 cards to see the future. But what lay beyond the 78th card?
As a design studio that is creating things that have not existed before, we are Card79.
We believe that the best design is like fortune-telling.
Fortune tellers inhabit the space between what is and what could be. It is in this space that we, as a studio, thrive. At Card79 we are dedicated to having a hand in shaping that unformed space, bridging it, and helping others envision it as well.
It’s not enough to just see the future; we give it a distinctive form and thoughtfully design its interactions with users. At the core of what we create is a humility and a dedication to the needs and experiences of our users as well as our clients. With our strong ability to understand what people want in a product, we endeavor to make future technology something people both today and tomorrow are excited about. From early concept to production, we take a beautiful design and find a way to bring it into the real world. We shape the future by grounding the present in an atmosphere of progress.
Because of human nature’s innate tendency to innovate, the future is constantly evolving. There is no limit to what might be real in a few years’ time — the times we live in attest to that. Our job as a studio is to help define what the world will look like when forward-thinking ideas, new scientific discoveries, and technological innovations meet user-centered products and experiences.
To tell the future, one must be guided by more than an inkling or an inclination. We are deeply rooted in spaces of innovation, and fueled by our drive to create the most beautiful and integrated interfaces between new (and sometimes unfamiliar) technology, and human users. Sitting across from a fortune teller requires a little bit of faith in the magic of the process — and ours is one that we have spent years refining. At Card79, we work to have the foresight — and vision — to imagine the future, and the skills and tools to create it.
Telling the future also requires a willingness to engage with the undefined, and all the risks entailed in that. By using a more agile mind and being more ready to make connections, a fortune teller can more vividly see what is coming. Their prowess lies not just in seeing the future but in speaking it out loud; conveying it as an answer to a question. While we as a studio remain grounded in the physical world, devoted to responding to scientific discovery, the spirit of mysticism and scrying gives us the framework to achieve greater conceptual leaps and intellectual clarity in our process.
We believe that human intuition and creativity are a powerful thing when honed correctly, and the fortune teller applies those ways of seeing the world in what they do. But what makes a good fortune teller is the ability to make the future resonate with the present. At the core of what we do as a studio is a dedication to human experience, and we work to ensure that the future is not only graspable, but approachable.
At Card79 we are informed by the past and the present, while remaining unfettered by them. We use our global perspective and longstanding experience in designing futuristic technology, to deliver compelling, carefully considered products worthy of the future. When all the cards have said what they have to say, Card79 points down the path yet untold; after all, the future — mesmerizing, daunting, and unknowable as it may be — is a human invention.