Evelyn Mora is an award-winning, sustainability, strategist and tech consultant. She is also the founder of the platform Digital Village. Digital Village is a social metaverse, built using its blockchain interface. The platform prioritizes sustainability socially as well as digitally, as well as asset and land ownership. Evelyn joined us to talk more about Digital Village, and how sustainability can go hand in hand with the Metaverse.
Hi, Evelyn, can you tell us about yourself and your background?
“Hello. my background is visual arts, product and service design, and development and the past decade of my career has been deeply rooted in supply chain management and sustainability. I’ve been working as a strategist to the public and private sectors as well as an inventor of products and services for corporations.”
“I am the Founder of the world’s first and most sustainable Fashion Week in Helsinki Finland, Helsinki Fashion Week was also the first 3D Fashion Week in the World. I am the EcoVillage concept creator and I founded the Digital Village Sustainability focused MMO Multiverse connected to its Marketplace and powered by Village Protocol Blockchain interface. I founded DV in 2021 to focus on cyber ethical aspects and digital sustainability.”
“I love nature, particularly the sea and rain. Big fan of fishing, my new hobby as well as yoga to keep my mind calm”.
What got you involved in the web3/metaverse space?
“I created the first 3D Fashion week in 2020. I noticed the many shortcomings in terms of mass adaption as well as challenges around ethical and sustainable internet.”
What is Digital Village? How does it work?
“The purpose of the digital village is to become the welcoming ecosystem that allows everyone to create in Web3 and integrate their digital assets and lifestyles seamlessly and ethically into the Multiverse.”
“The digital village is a real-time sustainability-focused MMO Multiverse, connected to its Social Marketplace, which merges the physical and digital world through its own social blockchain technology – the Village Protocol interface enabling interactive transparency, security, and traceability for digital assets.”
“The Village Protocol enables users to connect environments and assets connecting physical and digital through their digital footprints, applying human-centric design enabling seamless real-time access and utility.”
“Digital Village’s mission is to redesign our social understanding and sustainable integration of Web3 in Art, Design, and our Culture.”
“Users can purchase their own Metaverses as NFTs and build them, export assets from the marketplace, build their own environments and communities and have them instantly droppable with other Metaverses that have been created in the Digital Village Multiverse ecosystem.”
Why did you create the platform?
“After creating the first 3D Fashion Week I noticed the potential of blockchain Web3 in general and its challenges around, for example, how our online environments can be more optimised and more sustainable, how algorithms and applications and Web3 tech can be curated to be more sustainable and ethical to fit and improve our lifestyles.”
What does the future hold for Digital Village? What does the platform want to achieve in the short and long term?
“Essentially, we aim to give the agency to the user, include the user in the world creation process as much as possible. We don’t see ourselves necessarily as an application but rather at a tech provider, a tech company. We are testing, building, and perfecting these ‘in-game’ editor tools, marketplace activities, business models, and strategies that we want to further provide to our Villagers.”
“Hopefully, in the future, we can have a lot of user-generated created Metaverses that are unique and therefore inspiring, versatile and inclusive culturally. Then, hopefully, we can tackle challenges around sustainability in a 360-degree manner where we take everything from ethical internet data ownership, focusing on the balance between ownership and open source, and create a better social media gaming and e-commerce platform which is user lead and very deeply connected to the physical world and environment.”
What inspirits you most about the Metaverse?
“Definitely the possibilities and also tackling the challenges when it comes to the execution, there are a number of really interesting visions out there but not many breakthroughs, the question is execution, how do you actually create these tech tools and enable inclusive access to realizing these strategies and letting these strategies and visions benefit larger communities, so something can be beautiful but it has to be also functional and useful in the Metaverse.”
What do you personally want to achieve in the Metaverse space?
“Personally, I really want to tackle the sustainability aspect, so anything around issues such as cyberbullying, inclusivity, sustainable data management. Including and educating our community around those ideas, bringing new models of data ownership, monetization, and business models for commercial activities.”
“I’m also a very artistic person, I think that art and design are one of the most important key elements in the Metaverse, in terms of sound frequencies, colour movement, and texture.”
“All these aspects contribute to the full experience, to make it as sustainable as possible and most importantly, make it as unique and individually editable as possible.”
Your platforms have a heavy focus on sustainability. How important is it that the Metaverse and its encompassing technologies are sustainable?
“That the whole point is for Web3 to be better than Web2 to enable us to better our lifestyles not only in the digital space but also in the physical space which I think are deeply connected. Anything we’re doing in the online space echoes back to the physical space and vice versa, they are very much connected. I do think that you need to be very conscious of the kind of technology you use in order to tackle certain challenges and create certain experiences.”
“It really is key, and I think it’s a lot about the ‘savoir-faire’ approach when it comes to creating these tech tools, so it’s not about beauty and purpose alone, but also the usability and usefulness of these tools. I want to create something useful, that is better than what we currently have, whether that’s just interaction on social media or an e-commerce experience.”
“When it comes to tools like Village Protocol blockchain interface, the idea is to really design it as a solution to tackle long-standing challenges around blockchain mass adoption and the usability and usefulness of blockchain, and for it to be able to actually deliver and fulfill its potential.”
Do you think web3 offers an opportunity to promote sustainability and ensure environmental protection? Do you think it will foster cooperation towards better ecological norms?
“I do think that Web3 offers an opportunity to promote sustainability and ensure Environmental Protection, but there is a lot of brainwashing happening. I think that the intentions might be good but actually, the execution and the impact created can often be weak.”
“We definitely have the possibility to use this space and the tech tools to create a more sufficient, conscious, sustainable and ecological supply chain – better economic models and social environments. The question is, if the founders of Web3 will actually prioritize and put the time, resources and focus into making this a priority, it is really up to the founders at the end of the day, but it has to be now.”
“In the future consumers will be more conscious and aware that these things matter and they will be demanding them, so it’s easier and more sustainable to prioritise these aspects now from the get-go, rather than coming back in a few years and trying to rebuild and re-do things that we are currently creating.”
