Not only are NFTs bad for the environment, so far they haven't produced original or exciting work that pushes the boundaries of design, says Aaron Betsky.

When will we see good design as a NFT" That is, for me at least, the real question that arises out of the very sudden and meteoric rise of the value and the spread across the design world of what are essentially novel funding devices that are used by artists and designers, as well as collectors outside of the field.
Just as a refresher: a "non-fungible token" is a bit of blockchain-encrypted code that you can own and use in whatever manner you like. That ownership guarantees authenticity, but not uniqueness, as the maker could easily create another version of the same, in the manner artists sometimes redo the same image more than once ? think Munch's The Scream or De Chirico going back and recreating his most famous paintings decades later. NFTs have an ethereal and evocative quality that belies what might happen if you tried to construct them
The token is not an instructional manual or blueprint and is in fact not meant to lead in all cases to something that is realized in meat-space. Its beauty and its worth, lie in the freedom it thus has to be expressive and most of the works sold as NFTs have an ethereal and evocative quality that belies what might happen if you tried to construct them.
As such, NFTs could function in the manner of "paper architecture": they could offer visions of what could...