WORDS: Liezel Strauss
Our wrap-up of the final day of the Design Indaba 2012 conference.
The final day of 2012’s Design Indaba (not a) conference started with South African Clive van Heerden. He is the creative director of innovations at Philips Design in London. Van Heerden’s leadership has won numerous international awards including a Red Dot, IF Award and a Time magazine acknowledgment for Best Invention in 2007. He wowed the crowd with his most recent works: Emotional Sensing apparel (aka the blushing dress), Electronic Tattoo, and Microbial Home.
Philips encourages their developers to investigate and research taboos, and to collaborate with artists to find solutions. The Microbial Home is a result of this kind of holistic research. It is a domestic ecosystem that challenges conventional design solutions to energy usage, cleaning, food preservation, lighting, human waste and a healthy lifestyle. It is an integrated cyclical ecosystem where each function’s output is another’s input. Philips believes that many of the answers to the problem of waste and consumption of energy could be addressed by a lifestyle shift. At the heart of the Microbial Home system is the bio digester kitchen island which consists of a methane digester to convert bathroom waste solids and vegetable trimmings into methane gas that is used to power the home.
Van Heerden believes in collaborations, especially between artists and scientists, maintaining that art is an instrument of innovation but that it is under-utilised. He also believes that design has stopped asking difficult questions and that we don’t expect enough of technology in design.
At first we were sad when the MC announced that Gaston Acurio wasn’t coming but we could not have hoped for a better replacement: graphic designer Paul Sahre presented such a fresh and creative perspective of his work that the audience hung on every single word. He designed the box set for Malcolm Gladwell’s collection of books, but it is his latest work ‘When Will You Die’ that really wowed us. Paul and his team also constructed a gigantic pink monster truck for American Rock Group ‘They Might Be Giants’. This journey took him from designing an iTunes thumbnail image to creating a full-scale model of a Monster Truck Hearse. If you are up for an adventure, build your own, but make sure you have a whole lot of free time on your hands – it took Paul and his team 70hrs to print and 4 months to build it themselves!
At the end of the day Danish architect Bjarke Ingels took to the stage presenting a wonderfully fresh approach and methodology that he refers to as ‘hedonistic sustainability’. He often tries to achieve a balance between playful and practical approaches to architecture. Recently rated one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine and named Wall Street Journal’s Architectural innovator of 2011, we knew we were in for an inspirational session. His enthusiasm and passion for his industry is infectious and his no nonsense, out-of- the box approach has resulted in some of the most creative structures in the world.
Bjarke’s fearlessness is what makes his designs so memorable and in demand. Bjarke does not obey rules; he challenges the conventional and rewrites the rules. One of his projects included moving Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid stautue temporarily to Shanghai. He also designed an incinerator that doubles as a ski slope and won an architecture competition where the main rule of the brief was ignored (or perhaps more kindly, challenged) creating quite an uproar from the architecture board.
His most recent project is the new Tallinn town hall, aka The Democratic Periscope, which allows Estonians to check that its officials are busy running the city, not playing Angry Birds! The public can see into the meeting room of the Town Hall, creating radical transparency and inviting the public to participate in politics. “The idea is transparency — so people can see democracy at work,” says Ingels. “We thought that if we made the ceiling of the council chamber a gigantic mirror, it would reflect the landscape — a live portrait of the city that they’re messing with. They’ll be able to see if council members are absent,” he adds. “In theory, we’ll be able to see what notes are being scribbled down or what dirty deals are being plotted.”
See more of his work here: http://www.big.dk
