DesignIndaba, day 3, by Anne Taylor

Day three at the Cape Town International Convention Centre proved to be a showcase for artistry, passion and more than a touch of madness. Here are a few of my personal highlights and notes from the final day of creative mindblow:

Marian Bantjes: This illustrator and typographer from Canada proved my personal hero of the conference. Showing her exquisite, ornamental and obsessive drawings, she spoke of moving from mediocrity to magical meaning. Ten years as a typesetter and another good few years of running her own letterheads and brochure studio, left her feeling like she wasn’t creating anything worthwhile: “I recognised my own mediocrity.” So in 2003 she started a process of making things that were much more artistic and personal. After a year of hard work, but no income, she landed a cover job for Details magazine — just “in the nick of time”.

LOVE (and its twin sister, obsession) are important threads in all her work: from her 150 hand-drawn darling Valentines to her maxim: “It’s better to work for love than money.” It may sound like a glib statement that could only be made by someone who has tasted deep (and rich) success, but who does not recognise the disappointment and hardship of a job taken only for the money? As Bantjes reminded the audience: “The things I do for love sometimes magically turn into money.”

Taped to her desk is a small square of paper. On it are the criteria she uses to judge work — including her own:

• Does it bring joy?
• Is there a sense of wonder?
• Does it invoke curiosity?
• Could it inspire?
• Is it unusual?

Nobumichi Tosa of Maywa Denki: “I am an artist, not a designer.” Delightful, surprising and unbelievable genius! Dressed in a light blue electrician’s overall (with a shirt and tie), Tosa and his alphabet of nonsense machines and musical instruments invigorated the Indaba and shot it into the genius stratosphere. It answered, in the most deliciously eccentric Japanese manner, all of Bantjes’ criteria listed in abundance: joy and wonderment, curiouser than Alice could ever imagine, 100% inspirational and absolutely the most unusual display of how Tosa uses art, electronics and design as an “interface” to understand his world. It’s pointless trying to explain. Rather check him out in this recording from a live show, which showcases the eccentricity.

Revital Cohen: Asking the question whether animals can be transformed into medical devices, this understated English student’s work explores the use of transgenic animals as alternatives to inhumane medical therapies. Here, Cohen explores using animals, such as sheep, as life-support “devices” for renal and respiratory patients. So, essentially, the sheep’s kidneys do the work of a renal dialysis machine. Yip. Make of it what you will but don’t tell me it hasn’t made you think …

Javier Mariscal: Live, self-directed animation with this mad Spaniard as puppet master, lighting designer, musician and narrator? Though Mariscal’s “Indaba TV” ambition was a little dented by a few minor technical glitches, it was a brilliant performance which held the audience spellbound. And, perhaps, Mariscal’s words are the ones worth walking away with: “Don’t worry, take it easy. You will see … ”

Did you notice…

Making it personal: This year, most of the speakers and presenters included personal photographs in their presentations. There were the drawings they did as young children, the family holiday on the ranch, the awkward teen … I’m wondering if this introspection is not an indirect result of the global economic crunch, forcing people to re-examine what they do and why they do it? While I’m at it, anyone else notice just how many times the word “fuck” was used by the speakers? There seemed to be quite a lot of swearing going on this year — and not only because of the tech …

Now you’re smoking: Feeling like a paparazzo, I was amazed (and a little thrilled as a regretful non-smoker) to watch El Bulli genius Ferran Adriá light up a cigarette. But I reckon a man who takes five minutes to take a sip of water may just need some help in taking the edge off his taste buds.

Un-digital design: The Cape Town International Convention Centre is a fabulous venue and the conference ran extremely smoothly. My gripe, as always, is with the information on the conference and the lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date digital presence. I find it really strange that so little is written about the conference: a handful of blogs and almost nothing on Twitter. I find it even stranger that the designers don’t choose to showcase their websites or blogs. Where is web design on the programme anyway? I also can’t help feeling that Interactive Africa, the company that organises the Indaba, is missing a real opportunity of “spreading the word” by not live streaming the conference or, even, providing TED-like videos. Speaker after speaker praised Ravi Naidoo and recognised the Indaba’s role as an important international conference. But there are very few ways for the rest of the world to participate in it.

This posting was originally published on Thought Leader

DesignIndaba, day 2, by Anne Taylor

On collaboration and co-operation.

And here is Day 2: Small white dots, each with a single letter from the words “Issey Miyake”, reconfigure themselves on a black background, transforming unmistakably into a model marching down the catwalk. They multiply, alter and seemingly simple changes in position turns them into other figures and forms. The drumbeat of the soundtrack stopped our hearts and the cleverness of the animation took our breaths away. Dai Fujiwara, creative director for Issey Miyake, gave the audience at this year’s Design Indaba in Cape Town the gift of goosebumps. First screened at Fujiwara’s debut show as creative director of Issey Miyake in February 7 in Paris, the animation short is titled A-Poc Inside. (Incidentally, A-Poc, or “a piece of cloth”, was established in 1970 by Miyake and the two have been collaborating on it since 1997.) Fujiwara’s passion carried him and his entire team to the Amazon jungle on a “colour hunt”, where designers painstakingly matched swatches to the greens found in nature. The final selection of the palette of 3 000 greens will be seen in Paris when Fujiwara launches his new collection. That is passion. That is obsession. That is what I like.

There were quite a few other heart-stopping moments on day two, with the speakers once again being drawn together by an unspoken thread of commonality. If yesterday was all about reality and humanity, today it was collaboration and co-operation. It was clear from each speaker that at the heart of success is some form of working together, whether with a partner or a team — something which struck English designer Edward Barber of BarberOsgerby in his introduction to the display of the sublime, created with his partner Jan Osgerby. The special slot for South African animators was opened by Wixed Pixels director Craig Wessels, who paid meaningful tribute to “his team” as he walked us through some of the studio’s impressive and ambitious works, including the stunning work for this year’s Design Indaba.

Masters and Savant Worldwide co-founder Roger Smythe pressed play on a beautiful and clever presentation, giving the platform over to his employees, who, in turn, credited their “peer review” process as the idea breaker or the “consciousness you don’t really know you have”. Awesome (and a little ridiculous first thing in the morning) Jannes Hendrikz and Markus Smit are two of the threesome that make up the Blackheart Gang. (If you haven’t watched The Tale of How before, do it now!) Even in the short time these guys were on stage, it was clear that they need each other in a symbiotic and crucial way. And I was very disappointed that the gang’s illustrator, Ree Treweek, didn’t make it. Her work is delicate, surreal, over the top and absolutely fantastic. She should have been there for a standing ovation. (By the way, Smythe co-founded the studio in 2002 with Reto Reolon, another woman missing from the stage today.)

In fact, their absences, and the quirky and passionate presentation by Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola, reminded me why I am always disappointed by the poor representation of female designers at the Indaba. A swift count puts this year’s speakers at 26, with only eight of these being women (numbers exclude the Pecha Kucha line-up). That’s less than a third and this is made even more baffling by the fact that the auditorium is overwhelmingly female. Urquiola, described as an architect who is more proud of designing a teaspoon than a building, spoke of love, children, messiness, practicality, pregnancy and the passion of the artisan. In describing the glorious Fjord armchair designed for Moroso in 2002, she explains how the use of armchairs has changed. “They are not for someone sitting with a pipe and his feet up. It is a chair for you, the cat and the baby. You need the back, half an arm … and, voila! there you are!” Practical, beautiful and organic. The feminine presence is clearly present and celebrated in her work.

No matter. Male. Female. We need each other. And, in a display of how the internet can enable the power of thousands of people for good, InnoCentive chief executive Dwayne Spradlin showed off his “open innovation” platform, which matches R&D problems from almost every discipline — medicine, construction, engineering, etc — to its community of 170 000 so-called solvers. (Frankly, I’m hoping there was a designer in the audience who will help Spradlin solve the aesthetic problems of his rather awful-looking PowerPoint presentation…) Though there’s a cash incentive for solving problems, Spradlin insists research shows that the number one reason why people innovate is because “they want to work on the things that matter”. Despite the “poster child of crowdsourcing” being a for-profit company, I think it’s true enough to say that InnoCentive is changing the world by this global approach. And as Spradlin asked, “What if we all worked together, with common, connected, meaningful purpose? What if the world was powered by 7-billion people?”

What would it take to feed 7-billion people? That’s a question Ferran Adriá wouldn’t even attempt to answer. The world’s best chef brought the audience to its feet with his humility and humanness. His brow knotted as he spoke of the pain of creating food — kitchen cuisine — that is ahead of its time: once-off design pieces, of which only 10 to 40 can be produced each at a time. This is art, a painfully joyous process that ends with the destruction of what has been created. Chef at El Bulli, where the eight-hour eating experience costs 300 euro, Adriá and his team have occupied themselves for the past 25 years with the “why of things”. “In the mornings, for breakfast, we have coffee and fried eggs. For lunch, we have fried eggs and then the coffee. This may be a simple reflection, but why do we do it that way?” Describing himself as a cook above all else, Adriá said that making something is relatively simple: “You have an idea, you develop it and, if it works, we start doing it.” What is not simple is the idea. “How do you get an idea? This you cannot explain. It is part of the soul. And you can’t explain the soul.”

The day closed with Dutch product designer Marcel Wanders, who brought us back to the beginning, to the self: “You have to trust yourself and what you believe is right. And that is fucking dangerous.”

 This posting originally appeared on ThoughtLeader

DesignIndaba, day 1, by Anne Taylor

Masters of unreality get real

Reality and humanity strode on to the stage at this year’s Design Indaba, responding perhaps to the wake-up call offered by the global economic crisis. As Canadian designer and change activist Bruce Mau pointed out on day one of this most chichi of conferences, the current crisis shows us that what we are currently doing “just is not working”.

“The economic crisis is waking us up to love and ambition,” he said. And that, of course, is no bad thing. With more time and space, there is an opportunity to redefine how we do things. This is the best time in history to be active and working, maintained Mau: “There are opportunities open to us that have never been seen by any generation.”

Mau, who heads up the Institute without Boundaries, believes that embracing change is no longer a choice but the tool we must use to create and invent the life we want to live. And this reinvention is necessary: technological capacity is doubling every 12 months. Our ability to do things and to process information is reduced by half every year. And this, in turn, can only mean that “massive change is inevitable”. And, challenged Mau, the real objective is to change the way we live — with design the revolutionary key to invent a new and better way to do things. Design is everything we do and we should be using it for good — and what better time than now? After all, a crisis would be “a terrible thing to waste”.

Mau’s Institute without Boundaries is behind his concept of Centres for Massive Change. At the Indaba, he proposed the idea of a South African centre — and invited anyone interested in being part of this revolution to contact him (or Indaba organiser Ravi Naidoo) directly in the next few days.

Sleek and chic LA-based designers AdamsMorioka claimed to get “real and revealing” in their opening speech. I think most people in the audience related to Sean Adams’ admission that the genius and perfection on show at “super-duper-groovy-all-the-time” design conferences can easily make one feel like life sucks. And, yes, three days of what appears to be seamless perfection can do one’s head in. But, as Adams explained, it’s worth remembering that it is never as easy as it looks. So how is such design achieved? By confronting fear and overcoming that which you are trying to protect, said Adams, who was challenged by his partner Morioka to talk about the things designers are not supposed to talk about, like “fear and driving home crying in the car”.

Adams demonstrated the necessity of trusting your gut via a series of failed storyboards, which finally paved the path (back) to a magnificent final concept for the Sundance Film Festival back in 2006. “Life should be scary to be worthwhile,” he said. “As a friend in New York says, ‘No risk it, no biscuit’.”

This thread of the personal was picked up and embroidered by typographer and designer Rick Valicenti and his own evolution towards finding “real human presence” in design. In a presentation that I found deeply cerebral and honest, Valicenti — the founder and design director of Thirst — shared the personal “musings of a technocrat” and his journey over 30 years towards using design to tell stories. “I am now viewing design through the prism of storytelling — it’s new and it’s challenging.” And what lessons are in those stories? Valicenti says designers should: learn to practise seduction, represent presence, indulge knowingly, serve happiness, master humility.

What? A humble designer? Seriously? Ah, but perhaps I should heed Mau’s counsel: “We can no longer afford the luxury of cynicism” and instead admit to being touched by architect Luyanda Mpahlwa’s success with his design for a low-cost house. Part of the Indaba’s 10×10 Low-Cost Housing Project, which aims to “stimulate alternative solutions to housing”. Mpahlwa’s vision is to help “dignify” social spaces, bringing colour and safety to urban design and create places for children to play. MMA Architects’ design was awarded the inaugural Curry Stone a $100 000 prize, which recognises “creative solutions with the power and potential to improve our lives”. (Ironically, Mpahlwa was unable to be at the award ceremony for this philanthropic award, barred from obtaining a US visa because of the time he served as a prisoner on Robben Island.)

It was the need to become “a little more connected to people” that inspired American designer Stephen Burks to take up with crafters in what he terms the “developing world” to create products made by hand and using recycled materials. Although his presentation was awkward and jittery, hats off to Burks for giving local artists a platform.

Fighting to keep it real” was the payoff line from a spectacular Nokia ad, shot in downtown Mumbai by Indian “agency guys” Mohit Jayal and V Sunil. The challenge, they say is to solve the narcissism and selfishness of the middle classes. With an estimated 250-million members, the middle class in India exerts considerable power over the consumer landscape. But that massive stratum of society is cut off from what is real and from reality by what it thinks it wants, by aspirations and Bollywood glitz. The boys at W + K Delhi made a strong case for reality — yes, the true grit of life — and its power as an agent that can and should be harnessed to inspire and enable change. Day one at the Design Indaba put on an impressive and massive display of reality. Not bad for an industry whose chief concern is the unreal. This posting originally appeared on

 This posting originally appeared on ThoughtLeader