Design Indaba 2011 Closes

It was all go on the third and final day in Cape Town as the conference opened with the Design MBA: Mexico, Brazil and Africa featuring speakers from each of the countries.

Day 3

Fashion designer Carla Fernandez spoke about how she works with traditional Mexican styles and textiles in an unconventional way. As founder of fashion label and mobile design lab, Taller Flora, she travels around Mexico setting up workshops and local cooperatives for handcrafting textiles.

One thing that comes across is that the poncho is close to Fernandez’s heart. In 2008 she won the British Council’s International Young Fashion Entrepreneur Award. Her presentation focused on being resourceful and not playing around with something that’s expensive.

Also hailing from Mexico was Pedro Reyes, an artist pushing the boundaries in the creative fields. He explained how he focuses on "creating relationships and encouraging interaction."

Brazil was represented by four-piece design group Fibra, who began talking about trees and skateboards. They believe that design is an ongoing process that should facilitate the implementation of sustainable economy and integrating sustainable communities and cultural traditions.

The second session of Friday morning opened with African web entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth, who says you should “make no small plans” in life and “always be part of something that has meaning.” To Shuttleworth, ideas and innovation can come from anywhere but that doesn’t stop him from mentioning his own app and also Google, advising that you should never be properly searching for something, and that it should be there in front of you.

Self-confessed ‘typoholic’ Oded Ezer presented his story about a random tattoo request he once received via email and how he kindly obliged with a unique design. The Israeli also presented his Biotypography and a logo/poster campaign for the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

After lunch, accredited Danish designer Jens Martin Skibsted emerged onstage wearing a South African rugby shirt much to the delight of the audience. He spoke of aesthetic taste and even gave the audience something to stimulate the senses with his samples of “what a new bike should smell like”, having also wheeled out one of his latest bicycle designs. He also presented his work for Puma, based on the lifestyle for the city campaign (below).

Google’s Robert Wong (Face to Face coming later this week), a former accountant, began the final afternoon slot of the conference with thoughts on positive and negative interactions, the element of surprise and exceeding expectations. He referred to Dove’s Real Women campaign. Wong was clearly a man prepared for his presentation as he rolls out all sorts of material and references from Google’s library of work including the sticker shortcuts (below) and even a personal home video from when he surprised two of his friends, not with a birthday party, but with an actual wedding (they tied the knot). The clip certainly supported his final slide, which read, “do epic shit.

And speaking of epic, following Wong was the mystery speaker who was soon revealed as legendary South African musician, Hugh Masekela. As images of the man’s life were being projected on the big screen producer and friend, Stewart Levine, joined Masekela for a relaxed conversation before a live performance of the songs they had mentioned.

Having joined his band members, who had been waiting in the wings, the gig had everyone in the auditorium on their feet for one last hurrah before the conference came to a close for another year. That was the Design Indaba 2011, a truly inspirational conversation of diverse design and creativity.