Cape Town is in the process of preparations for a broad stakeholder forum in February in the run up to the official signing of the licence agreement by city Executive Mayor, Alderman Patricia De Lille, which will confirm its designation as World Design Capital 2014. In December DWA editor Lorelle Bell spoke to Icsidʼs Secretary General, Ms. Dilki de Silva, about Icsid’s choice of Cape Town and its expectations of the city …
A modular cycle designed by Cape Town-based design and innovation firm … XYZ Design to help solve the transport needs of rural communities in South Africa, is included in the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition which opened in New York on 15 October. The exhibition is run by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and this year it is being held at the United Nations in New York in a partnership with the UN’s Academic Impact global …
“As a designer, what solution, or template for one, can I provide that meets the needs of practically every African?” This is the question articulated by Nigerian designer Ukpong Ed’ Ukpong, a postgraduate student in the Industrial Design Department at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and a consultant on a research project in West Africa for Cape Town based (Industrial Design) firm … XYZ Design. It is a question with which many African designers grapple. A question compounded by working on a continent where design, and its solution-finding …
“Empathic Architecture” is the term used by Mariska Shioiri-Clark, and explained in her TEDx 2011 Stellenbosch presentation on the design methodology used when she helped design a new hospital for the Burera District of Rwanda. As a first year M.Arch student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Shioiri-Clark co-founded MASS Design Group with fellow students after hearing a talk on the provision of health care in developing countries by Paul Farmer of the organisation, Partners in Health. Farmer, a Harvard alumnus, was persuaded to include the architecture students as designers on …
As Edgar Pieterse, director of the Africa Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town reflects, the city is one which works for a “limited economic elite and tourists”. “If we accept,” he says, “that we have to stimulate the economic vibrancy of Cape Town, then there is little evidence of any innovative activity on the part of the public sector and its partners” Alluding to the development of Cape Town’s CBD, he attributes the decline in the numbers of …
Following a City Council decision in December to suspend the Bid Steering Committee “as its function to bid is completed” and appoint a team chaired by the Executive Mayor to “mobilise communities around World Design Capital and to look into partnerships with surrounding municipalities around World Design Capital 2014″, Mayor Patricia de Lille announced last week the formation of a multi-sectoral task team before her March signing of the licence agreement with …
M’Rithaa hopes that the legacy of this award will be that young local designers across the African continent will draw confidence in their skills and understand that they can hold their own anywhere in the world. He is positive that given the chance local design will reveal itself to be able to stand up to anything the world has to offer. But he is an equally passionate advocate for the need of young designers to understand their responsibilities and exercise the breadth of their potential influence. And this means eschewing the …
While it is heartening to hear politicians suddenly talking up design, too many public messages focus on anticipated increases in tourism and investment. We should learn from having had similar expectations from 2010. We need to build on Cape Town’s design story and realise design’s potential for truly transforming the city and this requires a much more considered understanding of design, and a much greater commitment to it. A good starting point might be to develop an agreed understanding of design: a task less easy …
Terry Kurgan is a Johannesburg-based artist whose solo practice includes a number of public realm projects that provide a lens through which her audiences’ perceptions of the subject matter are challenged and invariably changed. Part of the currency with which she’s achieved this is her ability to turn her subjects from passive objects of the artist’s observation into active communicators of their humanity (or human-ness) in the face of potentially dehumanising social conditions. In her most recent public project, she takes …
Last week, I attended my first township tour. Despite having worked in East and South Africa with a number of development groups these past few years, I went into the outing with mixed feelings. Non-profits and aid in Africa has been facing strong and vocal criticisms in recent years, from Dambisa Moyo to others. Handouts are a charged concept – that despite good intentions, there often are negative consequences with unforeseeable ripple effects. Yet I found myself walking away that afternoon with renewed …
One of the core elements underpinning the musical strategy, was a spatial strategy: connecting the central city as a site of heritage with sites in the Cape Flats, and by doing so attempting to create the basis for stronger linkages and movements of people and ideas. We wanted to link across apartheid boundaries and beyond cultural disconnects. Had the project lived beyond its pilot phase, this would have been a significant long term device for shifting some of the parameters of apartheid town planning and …
Participatory Design (PD) is gaining increased traction as a preferred methodology in new product development. It is considered a method whereby a variety of stakeholders are involved in the initial development of a product, or process, that will ultimately influence their way of life. Employing this collaborative approach in emerging countries has numerous opportunities, however as this article will outline, the methodology is not without its critics. The following text unpacks these concerns, by firstly …
This week the International Council for Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) launched the World Design Capital 2014 competition and Cape Town formally registered the intention to bid. Here, Kenyan-born and educated Mugendi M’Rithaa, a professor of Industrial Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and Adrienne Viljoen, Manager of the Design Institute at the South African Bureau of Design (SABS) in Pretoria speak about why Cape Town’s bid for World Design Capital is important for …
Icsid board member, Mugendi M’Rithaa, a professor at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, recently returned from a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, where the Icsid Executive Board had met for its latest meeting. He discusses with interviewer Michael Mwai the challenges that African designers face from the very definition of design to improvements of design education in Africa …
It appears to be the role of artists in society to be able to imagine and communicate ideals to which the rest of us aspire, regardless of how much reality might conspire against these ideals. If this is true, then South African architect Mokena Makeka is an artist first and foremost. For against the backdrop of our current reality in which design is misunderstood; its transformative potential unrecognised; and its need for public embrace not even on the national agenda, Mokena is nevertheless pursuing …
When Marlon Parker designed a cell-phone programme to help provide encouragement and support to a friend struggling with drug abuse, little did he dream that it would lead to the development of RLabs (Reconstructed Living Lab), a Bridgetown-based (Athlone, Cape Town) initiative that would be consulted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for assistance in reaching people with emergency information after the earthquake in Indonesia last year. Now RLabs has a global network of more than 500,000 people and …
