WORDS Nadine Botha
Following an epic Design Indaba Conference we just had to share our 11 favourite design and architectural solutions that will change the way you look at things – think of it as three-days distilled into an espresso!
1. Goodbye Citi Golf
“You don’t need a holiday, you need Cape Town,” is one of Chris Gotz, executive creative director of Ogilvy & Mather South Africa, most award-winning campaigns and we couldn’t have said it better. However what charmed us in his insightful chuckle-a-minute presentation was the goosebump-inducing campaign to say goodbye to the Citi Golf, South Africa’s best-selling car. Who hasn’t owned a Volksie at some point in their life?
2. The Cleveland Museum of Art
It’s no secret that VISI loves art, but interaction designer Jake Burton and his company Local Projects’ designs for the Cleveland Museum of Art blew open a whole new world for us. Using touchscreens, sensors and cameras it invites visitors to engage with the art using their bodies – make a facial expression and it will show you a matching artwork, or try match the pose of sculptures and be ranked in a hall of fame! An interactive wall of 3 000 artworks also lets visitors curate their own exhibition.
3. Caveaux bulles
The pecha kucha presentations by top graduates are one of our conference highlights, year in, year out. From ECAL in Switzerland, Matthieu Rivier must certainly be Harry Potter incarnate with his perception-defying installation designs. Just have a look at this shadow play with a twist – blown bubbles turn into animated hot air balloons.
4. Phonebloks
There was an audible buzz of excitement when the audience realised that the designer of Phonebloks – the proposed crowd-funded modular cellphone that went viral last year – was in the house. A student at Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands, Dave Hakken got everyone excited when he revealed that his simple idea was picked up by Google and Motorola (and he snubbed them) – big dreams do come true! Oh yes, he also made an edible pen for those who chew them.
5. Learning Hub
Of course we’re thrilled that Thomas Heatherwick will soon be working right here in Cape Town – we’ve written about it here and Debbie sings its praises here. Why are we so thrilled? Because of the genius he explained in this Singapore university design, in which corridors and corners were deisgned-out in order to make the building more sociable. What really got us however was how Thomas cast the concrete to have seductive textures so as to avoid the sense of dread that the economical material often creates. Simple genius.
6. Liverpool Department Store
A drummer in his previous life, and brimming with energy and wry humour (although he was diagnosed with ADD, he decided to make it stand for adaptive, diagnostic design) Mexican Michel Rojkind fed our architecture fetish in buckets. The Liverpool Department Store with its multi-layered hexagon-perforated façade was particularly exquisite, and functional, with windows serving as cafe booths. He’s also turning his attention to product design and showed us his suitcase that not only has wheels but serves as a seat or moped too.
7. Superdesk
Who knew that a South African architect designed the Googleplex!? Yup, Clive Wilkinson is his name and his game is reimagining office spaces to be more conducive to collaboration and ideas sharing – he, like Thomas also hates corridors. We couldn’t help thinking how much it echoed our The Office edition, but what made our eyes pop out of our head was the massive undulating collaborative table that seats all 125 employees of the Barbarian Group in London.
8. Pavillion Bel Horizon
We wear our love for Africa on our cover, so you can just imagine how charmed we were with Ivory Coast architect Issa Diabaté’s work. By simplifying African aesthetics into its minimalist modernist elements and seemingly breathing in a touch of Japanese, it really is fresh – and sustainable too.
9. Zonnebloem Renamed
A new feature on the programme this year was Serpentine Gallery curator Hans Ulrich Oberist in conversation with six South African artists who were born in or after 1989. It forms part of Hans and Simon Castets’ 89 Plus project that investigates the new generation of creative innovators who were born after the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended and the internet began. In the session, performance poet Kyla Philander coined what Li Edelkoort tweeted as being “the most significant notion” of this year’s Design Indaba: “The major design tool in my life is empathy.” But what sparked cheers from the crowd was artist Haroon Gunn-Salie’s video showing him changing all the street signs that read Zonnebloem back to District Six! Keep an eye on Haroon – he counts P Diddy among his patrons.
10. Mico for Magis
There wasn’t much in the way of product or furniture design at this year’s conference and what there was really seemed to be asking difficult questions like whether we actually need more stuff. Particularly playful and experimental were El Ultimo Grito, a Spanish design collaboration based in London, whose Mico product for Magis is anything you want it to be. Inspired by a hide-and-seek game they played with their daughter, it could be a chair, a table, a shelf or the central pole of a blanket tent – your imagination’s the limit.
11. Naoto Fukasawa
Product and furniture design sensei Naoto Fukasawa has gone beyond his impeccably intuitive Japanese minimalism to also start asking what “stuff” is really for. He spoke about how increasingly furniture is disappearing into architecture and products integrating with the human body, meaning that his role as industrial designer is transforming into that of an interaction designer. Designing with our bodies, not our minds, is more honest, he said talking about intuition: “My products are already in your mind but you have not seen it yet.”
Of course, we also absolutely adored the presentations of Stefan Sagmeister, Dean Poole, David Goldblatt, Lauren Beukes and… but you can read about that in Debbie’s moving ode to her first Design Indaba.