Design Indaba 2014

Follow our live blog for the latest updates from selected sessions of this year’s Design Indaba.

DESIGN INDABA 2014

Wed 26 Feb

“Every child is an artist. The challenge is to remain one,” Chris Gotz, Creative Director at Ogilvy Mather Cape Town as Design Indaba gets underway at the Cape Town International Convention Centre

10:09 am- Wed 26 Feb

Chris Gotz talks about Ogilvy’s campaign to say “Goodbye” to the Citi Golf, which was then South Africa’s most loved vehicle. It was one of the most successful campaigns generating millions of rands’ worth of free publicity.

10:15 am- Wed 26 Feb

“Our ability to pay attention to the world is shrinking. Our heads are in our phones.” – Chris Gotz

10:26 am- Wed 26 Feb

Juliana Rotich, a computer scientist from Kenya, takes to the podium.

10:28 am- Wed 26 Feb

Juliana Rotich displays slide showing a map of fibre optic cables under the sea around the African continent. This reflects “how ships used to move around Africa”. Rotich says there remains a lot of opportunity to link Africans to other Africans.

10:34 am- Wed 26 Feb

Ushahidi.com is a non-profit open source software company for information collection started in kenya after the disputed 2007 Kenyan election to give ordinary citizens a voice. “We just wanted to do something,” says Juliana Rotich

10:37 am- Wed 26 Feb

“As designers we are here to keep a keen eye on what is happening because it pushes the boundaries of what is possible,” – Juliana Rotich

10:42 am- Wed 26 Feb

iHub, a collaborative workspace in Nairobi, has incubated thousands of upstarts, says Rotich. “We’ve got to create spaces where people are collaborating and doing things together.”

10:46 am- Wed 26 Feb

“Why do we use technology designed for London to Los Angeles when we live in Nairobi? Why don’t we design technology that is responsive to the African context?”

10:49 am- Wed 26 Feb

Rotich introduces the BRCK, a self-powered internet connection device. Follow the BRCK on @brcknet

10:55 am- Wed 26 Feb

Africa only has 15.6% internet penetration.

“There’s a link between increasing connectivity and increasing Gross Domestic Product,” Juliana Rotich says in closing.

11:35 am- Wed 26 Feb

Singer Nonku Phiri performs ahead of the next talk

11:39 am- Wed 26 Feb

Experimental Jetset is an Amsterdam based graphic design studio. Founders Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen are now speaking.

11:51 am- Wed 26 Feb

“We actually hate helvetica,” says Danny van den Dungen. Yet they use it a lot in their design. Much laughter from the audience.

11:52 am- Wed 26 Feb

The panel, Experimental Jetset on stage.

11:54 am- Wed 26 Feb

“With (Stanley) Kubrick we find there’s always a stylised existential terror.”

Marieke Stolk on one of their influences. Stanley Kubrick is probably most commonly known for the classic film ‘Clockwork Orange’

12:02 pm- Wed 26 Feb

As tweeted by @OgilvyCT

12:04 pm- Wed 26 Feb

“Language is, before anything else, material. It can be shaped in any way you like,” says Marieke Stolk

12:12 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Experimental Jetset say the structure of the Os Mutantes song “Bat Macumba” is an influence on their design style.

12:17 pm- Wed 26 Feb

“We realise we are basically scavenging the wounds of modernism…”

- Marieke Stolk

12:20 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Jake Barton is the next speaker. He is the founder of Local Projects, a New York-based design firm

12:24 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Improvisation

“Start with Yes,” says Jake Barton

12:35 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Jake Barton demonstrates how they have taken new technologies and translated them for a museum, for instance, not to change but to amplify the experience of being in a museum. Video shows people in art museums using various devices to engage with the artworks.

12:40 pm- Wed 26 Feb

If you spend too much time refining things it leads to producing “terrible work”, according to Jake Barton. “Until you see something working, you don’t get that moment where you are like ‘whoa, this is amazing’.”

12:52 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Jake Barton and his firm were commissioned to work on the 9/11 Memorial Museum project. Global call was made for people to share online their experience of that day in 2001. “When you go into the museum itself the first voice you hear won’t be a curator but other visitors telling you what their experience of 9/11 is.”

1:06 pm- Wed 26 Feb

“Improvisation and Love” is how Jake Barton ends his talk, shows video of people engaging with the Valentine’s Heart sculpture on Times Square, New York.

2:00 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Lunchtime is up! Next talk begins now in a packed auditorium.

2:11 pm- Wed 26 Feb

“On a daily basis we are making a mess,” says Ije Nwokorie as he opens his talk at Design Indaba. “If you think about the processes that matter to people- democracy, for instance, they are really messy things.”

2:13 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Nwokorie: “People’s desks have to be messy, a manifestation of themselves”

2:15 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Nwokorie is the Managing Director of Wolff Olins, a London-based brand consultancy

2:28 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Nwokorie and his firm sent a small orange box with a switch around the world asking people what it made them think of in a campaign for telecommunications company Orange. One of the answers from a Senegalese lady is that if she could switch that light on she wishes her country would instantly become part of the developed world.

2:33 pm- Wed 26 Feb

With the Virgin Media logo, Nwokorie’s firm made people engage with the brand by asking them to draw the ribbon logo in the air. “People need to be really free about how they use a brand. get more and more people to get involved in a brand.

2:36 pm- Wed 26 Feb

In Africa creativity is not an option. We kind of have to be creative in order to survive, have the ability to think through things, to understand that systems don’t always work. So, you have a natural inclination to think about a way around things.

2:41 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Nwokorie ends his talk by playing a video about a brand they worked on called “Little Sun”. Read more about the brand here.

2:45 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Audience getting a dose of inspiration from young design graduates from across the world, speaking about some of their designs.

2:54 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Ian Murchison, now on stage, worked at Blackberry as an accessories designer and when he felt he had “peaked” at Blackberry he went on to create his own design firm. “What I knew I wanted to do was to get away from electronics and start exploring different things using different materials. What we noticed, coming from corporates with huge resources, is that creating co-working spaces is really vital.”

3:05 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Dave Hakkens, currently speaking, designed Phonebloks. The Vision, as spelled out on his website, was to create a phone “worth keeping”. The designer turned down a job at Google and is still pursuing the dream of creating a phone worth keeping. Visit his website by clicking here

3:12 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Agatha Haines, a graduate of the Royal College of the Arts, is now on stage. She, in her own words, designed a “series of aerodynamic babies”. Audience seems quite entertained.She calls herself a “little Frankenstein” and designed entirely new internal organs, too. These organs can help prevent strokes and heart attacks. Quite interesting (and she’s funny)!

Visit her website agihaines.com

3:28 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Stefan van Biljon is from Cape Town. His thesis as an undergraduate at the University of Cape town in 2010 about spatial manipulation shows how the Cape Town landscape allows it to be a fortified city that was ideal for apartheid segregation.

4:15 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Tom Hulme is up next. He is design director at IDEO in London, an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centred, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.

4:16 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Singer Bongeziwe Mabandla performs ahead of Tom Hulme’s talk

4:20 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Tom Hulme speaking about technology.

4:32 pm- Wed 26 Feb

We’re all designers

We achieve more through collaboration

Tech is just a design tool

“Let’s stop structuring businesses with a digital team.”

- Tom Hulme

4:33 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Tom Hulme: “People say technology makes us anti-social. I guarantee that for the last 5 hundred years people were saying the same thing.”

4:35 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Tom Hulme: “Design has to address a real human need in a low friction way.”

4:41 pm- Wed 26 Feb

A few points as Tom Hulme speaks:

Technology changes rapidly but Maslow’s hierarchy of needs remains the same.

Great designers meet real human needs with lower friction and they make design delightful.

If you can’t start a project by first identifying a human need that it will address, don’t start it.

5:04 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Final speaker for the day Thomas Heatherwick, UK-based designer, is now on stage.

5:08 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Heatherwick designed the Olympic cauldron for the London Olympic games. Watch the video of it being lit to appreciate the gorgeous design…

5:18 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Heatherwick’s company was commissioned to design the building of a University in Singapore. The brief was that the lecture halls are to have no corners. This is what they came up with…

5:35 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Heatherwick: “Somebody once said to me the sign of a rich city is that rich people there use public transport.”

5:38 pm- Wed 26 Feb

“When something is what people expect, their perception cone- I just made that up- closes.”

6:15 pm- Wed 26 Feb

Wrapping up the first day of Design Indaba 2014, Heatherwick announces a project he is working on with the owners of VA Waterfront.

“Today is a chance to show a project that has a future here in Cape Town, it wouldn’t have happened without Ravi and the Indaba,” he says.

Heatherwick revealed, for the first time, the design of a new Museum for Contemporary Art that will be built by converting the old grain silo building at the Waterfront.

This is a sneak peek into what they envision the museum will look like…

How grand?

And with that… Day one of the Design Indaba draws to a close.

Heatherwick: “This is the most exciting presentation that I’ve ever had to give.”

Design Indaba 2014