The Object Issue
In honor of the physical object that is an egg, three stories this week about tangible things; why some become cultural artifacts, why some fall flat as gimmicks, and why some might be the future of
Happy Easter, if you follow the tradition and go outside to touch grass and find eggs, good for you! In honor of the physical object that is an egg, three stories this week about tangible things; why some become cultural artifacts, why some fall flat as gimmicks, and why some might be the future of hospitality.
The Enduring, Paper-Thin Charm of the Guest Check
My hate for the QR code menu is not discrete, I like to have my restaurant meal screen free, hence I like physical menu and physical check. Two pieces, when well designed, can radically change how a restaurant is perceived. Menus are an easy piece of inspiration for UGC as thousand of Pinterest pin and insta photo testify. But more interestingly it’s also a source of fetish for people who love to collect it, among who, the New York Public library who created a digital archive of more than 17K menu from restaurant starting as early as 1851. Unfortunately for security reason, they had to retire the website and its open API in 2025, the CSV is still available for download if you’re a data nerd with too much free time.
Guest check, like restaurant menu, is also a great canvas for art and nostalgia, as the New York Times explain, this century old slip of paper, even if made obsolete by tech, has became a cultural artifact and now common artistic medium.
In a world where you can create an AI version of your vacation to pretend you were somewhere, having physical proof that you actually been somewhere became valuable. For hotels and restaurants who slowly stripped their properties of anything physical, it’s time to reinstate crafted well-thought objects. If I had to choose two; great doorknob and nice towel.
Anthropic wants AI to feel tangible. First attempt: a coffee pop up with Airmail and baseball hats that read “thinking”, as in thinking hat. Latest attempt: partnering with San Francisco’s de Young Museum by installing typewriters as physical interfaces to chat with Claude. Visitors typed a short question about the Monet exhibition (limited to 8-10 words), and Claude, drawing on exhibit labels and other museum-provided information about Monet, generated a response typed out onto a sheet of cream cardstock, which the visitor could take home.
See the pattern? A tech company desperately seeking physicality, and producing a glorified printout every time. The coffee or the hat, these objects carry no history, no earned meaning. They’re manufactured moments designed to make a digital product feel less scary, and the audience sees right through it.
All the feedback I read are quite aligned, pointing toward disappointment and not buying the hype. Wong’s is still the one who say it the best:
In theory, Claude the AI was supposed to deepen my knowledge of Claude the painter. But all the typewriter added to my experience was ink and, I suppose, a piece of reprocessed dead tree to take home.
That’s the difference with the guest check, Physical works becomes cultural when it’s organic, but fails when it’s manufactured.
Everyone Has Designs on Custom Embroidery
If you study the history of customer services, as one do for fun, you realize that customer service was first handle in-house, then offshored to cheaper country, then now reshored in America, at least for the premium support. The reason is because local talents produce higher quality, have better training. The trade off of having premium local services, hence more expensive one, is balanced by repetitive tasks being automated by AI.
Embroidery suffered the same fate:
In 1972, 90% of the embroidery machines in the country sat along a six-mile stretch in Hudson and Bergen Counties, NJ — the “schiffli area,” named after Swiss-designed machines. It supported 9,400 jobs, 2,400 workers within walking distance. By the 1990s it all moved overseas or went digital.
But could also come back stronger. The New York Times profiles a handful of independent embroidery artisans whose hand-stitched work for celebrities and brands is thriving as a direct counter-reaction to fast fashion and automatic-era mass production.
Hotels went hard on collab and mass-produced swag which lost any cultural value immediately. The smart move now is the opposite: descale, work on smaller, very personalized pieces that become a true proof of stay. Not embroidered initials on a bathrobe, as fluffy as the bathrobe could be, that’s lazy personalization. Commission a local artisan to stitch something that only makes sense if you were there. Something a guest can’t get on Ebay and won’t throw away.
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