Interview about AI Sealer Personalized Service System, winner of the A' Cultural Heritage and Culture Industry Design Award 2025
The AI Sealer project merges traditional Chinese seal carving with intelligent manufacturing. This design enables users to customize seals via a three step process: text input, font selection, and layout adjustment. Seal designs are certifiable as NFTs. Beyond digital use, AI Sealer extends to physical creation. A carving machine produces tangible seals, and digital designs apply to items like tote bags and electronics.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe process began with the digitization of ancient texts and historical records. This wasn't merely simple scanning; it involved building a vision-based knowledge database of seal characters. This extensive digital archive meticulously cataloged seal characters from various historical periods and stylistic schools, with each character's radicals carefully tagged. This provided a robust data foundation for our AI's learning.Next, we leveraged this rich database to train deep learning algorithms. These algorithms were specifically developed to reproduce the distinctive calligraphic styles of master carvers. They can precisely restore existing historical styles and also augment and enrich current Chinese character sets, offering users wider design choices.Finally, we brought this digital artistry to life through the intelligent carving machine. This system acts as a seamless cloud-connected bridge between the online and offline worlds, allowing users to remotely operate the carving machine and precisely engrave their designed seals. This remote operation capability significantly enhances the accessibility of this traditional art form, eliminating geographical and logistical barriers.Through these steps—from digitizing historical knowledge and intelligently reproducing styles to enabling remote physical creation—AI Sealer truly fuses the ancient art of seal carving with advanced AI technology, making it accessible and preserving its precious heritage for future generations.
First, there's the complexity of converting modern Chinese characters to seal script. The core of seal carving is zhuanshu, which differs significantly from contemporary characters. Our challenge lay in enabling users to input modern Chinese while still generating zhuanshu that aligns with traditional aesthetics. We trained a deep learning model on a vast collection of seal carving works, allowing it to intelligently convert modern characters into traditionally styled zhuanshu variations. We also offer various traditional font choices, ensuring the converted text is both recognizable and rich in ancient charm.Second, we faced the contradiction between popularization and artistic integrity. While making seal carving accessible is easy, doing so without diminishing its artistic quality is difficult. Our current solution offers a rich selection of traditional styles, emphasizing personalization over randomness. Through the intelligent carving machine, we aim to deliver a “what you see is what you get” seal carving experience, allowing users to visually transform their designs into reality. However, we acknowledge that current machine carving still has room for improvement in the knife mark aesthetic and compositional expression, not yet fully reaching the artistic standard of master seal carvers and retaining a somewhat rigid, industrial feel. Enhancing the machine’s performance in these artistic details is a key focus for our future research and development.Finally, we addressed the declining practical utility of traditional seals in modern society. With fewer traditional applications, making the art relevant to users today was a challenge. We don’t just offer physical seal production; we've also expanded its application scenarios, such as using designs on canvas bags or electronic products. The integration of NFT certification further enhances its digital collection value, significantly boosting seal carving’s relevance and appeal in contemporary society.
First, it significantly lowers the barrier to entry, enabling “universal participation.” Traditional seal carving's long learning curve and demanding skill requirements are daunting. AI Sealer simplifies this complex design process into intuitive, user-friendly steps. This means anyone, regardless of artistic background or carving skill, can easily design a seal, greatly expanding the audience for seal carving culture and allowing more people to experience and appreciate this ancient art.Second, it shifts users from “passive reception” to “active creation,” significantly boosting cultural belonging. Historically, people often bought pre-made seals or commissioned artisans, acting as passive recipients. AI Sealer empowers users to become designers themselves, freely customizing text, fonts, and layouts for highly personalized results. This shift from consumer to creator fosters a deeper emotional connection with seal carving culture, transforming users from observers into active participants and inheritors of this heritage.Finally, the three-step process seamlessly integrates digital experience with physical creation, revitalizing tradition. The design is completed online, then effortlessly translated into a physical object by the intelligent carving machine. This blend of virtual and tangible not only broadens seal carving’s forms of expression and dissemination but also injects new life into this ancient art in the digital age. Users can even convert their designs into NFTs for digital collection, accelerating seal carving's cultural preservation and innovation.
Integrating NFT certification into the AI Sealer system adds a contemporary dimension to this traditional craft, driven by a desire to meet the digital age’s demand for unique ownership and rarity, thereby imbuing seal designs with digital value. This move expands the application boundaries of traditional craftsmanship, extending it from the physical realm into the digital domain, and creating new use cases and business models. Concurrently, the traceability and global liquidity of NFTs significantly enhance seal carving’s dissemination and collection value as cultural heritage.For users, NFT certification brings multiple value enhancements: it bestows a unique digital identity and ownership upon their designs, ensuring the immutability and exclusivity of their creations. As unique digital assets, NFT seals gain collection value and potential for future appreciation. Furthermore, NFT platforms foster community interaction and cultural dissemination, building a digital seal carving ecosystem. Crucially, NFT technology provides art authentication and provenance tracking capabilities, effectively safeguarding the rights of creators and collectors and ensuring the authenticity and uniqueness of the artworks.
The core objective of the AI Sealer’s intelligent carving machine is to bring traditional seal carving into everyday homes. We recognized that existing seal carving machines are typically large industrial equipment, lacking user interfaces and entirely unsuitable for personal use. Therefore, our design principle was to miniaturize the machine to the size of a 3D printer, vastly improving user convenience while ensuring ultimate carving precision and artistic integrity.To achieve this, we comprehensively optimized the machine’s specifications. Within its compact 421mm x 421mm x 457mm dimensions, we integrated high-precision carving technology. This was made possible by in-depth research into the microscopic details of traditional seal carving and a meticulous selection of materials. We chose high-strength materials like magnesium-aluminum alloy and stainless steel for the stable body, ensuring pinpoint accuracy and vibration elimination during micron-level carving. Simultaneously, the use of tungsten steel cutting tools guarantees sharp and delicate lines, perfectly replicating the knife characteristic of authentic seal art.Furthermore, we integrated an intelligent control system with a user-friendly interface. The machine can precisely digitize complex seal carving strokes and is equipped with automatic dust extraction and precise tool positioning functions, ensuring a clean carving process and high-quality finished products. AI Sealer is not merely a technological leap; it's an innovative practice that makes ancient seal carving accessible, allowing more people to easily experience and inherit this cultural heritage.
Our initial vision was to enable users, without any professional background, to “personally design” a culturally rich seal – a skill traditionally requiring years of mastery for artisans.Achieving this vision hinges on a seamless user experience combined with intelligent manufacturing. First, we developed an intuitive and responsive mobile application, built on a “what you see is what you get” design philosophy. Users simply input text, select styles, and adjust layouts, seeing real-time previews that completely remove traditional design barriers.Next is the cloud-connected data integration. Once a user finalizes their digital design, our machine converts all design information into precise tool path data executable by the carving machine. This fully automated process ensures that digital creations are faithfully and accurately transformed into physical objects.Finally, by integrating map information, we’ve implemented a convenient “online design, offline production” model. Users can easily locate the nearest intelligent carving machine, scan a QR code to instantly start carving, and enjoy the "immediate production" satisfaction. The machine’s high efficiency further reinforces this instant gratification, allowing users to quickly turn virtual ideas into tangible art. Through these innovations, AI Sealer has successfully built a bridge, letting users enjoy the convenience of the digital world while experiencing the unique charm of physical art, truly integrating seal carving into everyday life.
Our extensive research into historical seal learning materials played a crucial role in developing AI Sealer’s ability to authentically replicate various traditional styles. This research served as both the aesthetic evaluation standard for generated characters and the core driving force behind our commitment to reproducing the beauty of seal script.Specifically, we deeply analyzed vast amounts of historical seal rubbings and ancient texts. This research allowed us to systematically deconstruct and distill the unique aesthetic principles of seal carving works from different historical periods, schools, and master artists. This included microscopic details like variations in stroke thickness, roundness versus sharpness, solidity versus emptiness, breaks, and flying white effects, as well as the compositional principles of density, balance, and rhythm in layout. This "visual knowledge" derived from history directly forms the aesthetic basis for our deep learning models' style generation and optimization.By converting these complex aesthetic principles and visual features into quantifiable data and integrating them into algorithm training, AI Sealer can intelligently generate seal script characters that are both true to traditional aesthetics and vibrant, even when users input modern Chinese characters. Therefore, historical research is not merely data collection; it is key to achieving both the “form and spirit” of seal script, ensuring that AI Sealer, while popularizing the seal carving experience, can maximally replicate and pass on its profound artistic charm.
First, AI Sealer breaks down the high barriers of traditional seal carving. By simplifying the design process, providing intelligent tools, and offering convenient customization services, seal carving is no longer exclusive to a few professionals. This democratization allows the public to easily access, experience, and inherit seal carving, a crucial strategy for cultural preservation in the digital age.Second, AI Sealer imbues traditional crafts with new vitality and economic value. Facing the challenge of declining practical utility for many traditional crafts, it not only provides practical personalized customization functions but also, through NFT certification, grants seal carving works digital asset attributes and collection value. This creates new growth points for traditional crafts in the digital economy, enabling their sustainable development and enhancing their vitality.Furthermore, AI Sealer promotes the digital preservation and global dissemination of cultural heritage. Its core lies in digitizing the essence of seal carving art by learning and storing relevant data through deep learning models. Combined with online design and the global circulation of NFTs, seal carving culture can transcend geographical boundaries, attracting enthusiasts worldwide and achieving wider dissemination.Most importantly, AI Sealer redefines the relationship between tradition and innovation. It proves that technology does not replace tradition but empowers it, allowing it to flourish in a new contemporary context. This contributes to a broader conversation on how to utilize advanced technology to revitalize, preserve, and innovate endangered cultural heritage, rather than simply archiving it. By blending traditional art with trending technologies like AI and NFTs, AI Sealer effectively sparks interest in traditional culture among younger generations, ensuring the intergenerational transmission of cultural heritage.
Traditionally, high-quality seal carving relied heavily on a craftsman’s years of skill and experience, making it niche and prone to individual variations. Our system completely transforms this. Users design their unique seals through the intuitive app interface, selecting text, fonts, and layouts. This digital blueprint is then seamlessly translated into precise carving instructions for our intelligent machines. The high degree of automation in the production process eliminates human inconsistencies, ensuring that every single seal produced—even at scale—meets rigorous standards for accuracy and detail, achieving scalable quality control.This method means that users, regardless of their artistic background, can obtain a personalized seal that is both unique to them and consistent in quality. It shifts the paradigm from traditional, bespoke, handcrafted exclusivity to a widely accessible, high-standard personalized service, truly democratizing this intricate traditional art form.
First, we’ll continue to deepen our research into seal carving styles, constantly optimizing our deep learning models to replicate an even wider array of traditional styles, even enabling the integration of personal unique styles. This will push personalized creation to its extreme, truly realizing the collaborative creation of seal art.Second, we envision integrating Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Users will be able to leverage AR technology to preview seal effects in real-world environments. Or, through VR, they can personally experience carving in an immersive virtual space, feeling the joy of seal carving even without a physical machine. This also includes exploring haptic feedback to simulate tool-material interaction, providing a multi-sensory immersive experience.Furthermore, we are committed to building a global, open, co-creation ecosystem for seal art. In this ecosystem, users can not only create but also share, communicate, and even, through blockchain technology, have their unique digital seal artworks become symbols of identity, core digital collectibles, or empower more virtual items within the metaverse, imbuing them with profound cultural heritage and unlimited value. This is not just about the digital inheritance of seal art, but about opening up new business models and cultural influence for it in the future digital world.Ultimately, AI Sealer aims to be a bridge connecting the past, present, and future, allowing this ancient art, with its millennia of wisdom, to radiate a more enduring and brilliant light in the digital age.
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