![[Design Indaba 2012] Who said you can't change the world with design?](https://biz-file.com/c/1203/95588.jpg)
If we take certainty to include suburban sprawl, monoculture farming, a billion slum dwellers worldwide without access to services and 270 million landmines buried in the ground, then it seems we should have no option to investigate the uncertainty, the unknown, the unexplored in pursuit of new solutions.
Those who are succeeding in supplying the new tools are doing so by admitting that, while they may not have all the answers, they are certain that ethics and integrity will always get you a better outcome than money and power, and are backing up their ideologies with a whack of global success stories.
For example, the presentation by local heroes, creative director Justin Gomes (@justinjgomes) and MD Charl Thom (@charlthom) of the serial award-winning Cape Town ad agency FoxP2 entitled "Why Wookies don't wear pants", was inspired by the fact that, when the Star Wars series was just a storyboard in George Lucas's mind, studio bosses were concerned that people would be offended by the nakedness of the character the world has come to know as Chewbacca!
With hindsight, the very idea of passing up the opportunity to make Star Wars is as sad as those guys who turned down a place in the Beatles or U2, but, as Gomes pointed out, "Try selling the concept of a Wookie to your board of directors."
Besides the fact that neither studio bosses nor their audiences in the making had ever heard of a Pan-Galactic fairytale, going on past experience, they were concerned that if they did make the movie, it should be with recognised Hollywood stars of the day, set to a disco beat and the actors' names scrolling up before the movie started, as had traditionally been done. As we know, none of this happened.
What did happen is that Lucas succeeded in creating a new group of superstars, a real Galactic empire of production and of merchandising, outside the virtual one, that had previously not existed, by breaking with best practice ideas and blazing his own trail: better practice.
American social entrepreneur John Bielenberg explained that we humans are victims of a thing called heuristic thinking, which leads our brains to always try to get directly from A-B, but believes that between the ages of 18 and 26, before our minds get calcified, is the best time to harness the necessary disruptive thinking that can lead to new outcomes.
Bielenberg's initiativesProject M, COMMON ("do shit that matters") and FUTURE, are not so much about thinking, as about doing, getting out, talking to people and "making stuff". Via a two-week immersion programme, students from across the world get to solve any kind of social or service delivery problems of their choice.
For instance, one day they just decided to make pies and sell them on the street in a poor neighbourhood of downtown Alabama. They got dressed up and painted everything orange and got people talking and enjoying themselves over coffee and pies in the street. This sparked something and the next thing they had fitted out a little restaurant - a pop-up pie lab - serving coffee and pies.
The best thing about the place was that it only had one table so every one of all races had to sit together, which had apparently never happened in Alabama before. Based on this experience, the students secured premises and opened a proper Pielab, fitting out the whole place themselves.
This year, the restaurant, which they put together for onlUSy $9 000, received the James Beard Award [which is like the Oscars for restaurants] for Best Restaurant design. First prize going to a new restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum in New York - the absolute polar opposite of a hand-hewn, do-it-yourselfer on Main Street, Greensborough!
Speaking of restaurants, the founder of the world's best restaurant, Rene Redzepi (@ReneRedzepiNoma) of Noma, in Copenhagen, Denmark, was in the indaba house yesterday. Redzepi says he does not really understand how one can determine which is the best restaurant in the world, but that as 800 people voted in a democratic process, he is happy to accept the title, which has led to so many lives being positively transformed.
Here again is story of someone achieving success by pursuing a unique vision, which others said could not be done. In Europe especially, perceptions of fine dining have traditionally needed to include crystal and gold and silver and fancy cloths, Redzepi wanted to strip away all of that and have bare wood handcrafted tables, using only locally grown and foraged ingredients. Let's face it, a Tundra climate does not immediately spring to mind as a garden of bounty, coupled with the fact that the region has absolutely no tradition of spices or sensuality in its cuisine.
The twittersphere went wild with mirth after Redzepi's quote: "A chef creates something that turns to shit in 24 hours." But let that not distract us from the meaning of this world title.
Every meal is a moment in time - using what is found - on the forest floor, in the field, wild beech leaves, pine cones, infusions of duck bones, mushrooms, rose petals, hay... Breaking more models, there are also three times more chefs than the 40 people the restaurant can serve and no waiters.
The chefs come out of the kitchen, all hot and sweaty and fired up to bring you your food as an offering, with both hands extended. This is what passion and vision look like; this is what world-number-ones look like, stripped of trappings, revealing truth. Redzepi says he wishes farmers got more credit for what they do; it is their expertise that should be up on the indaba stage, and he has a point.
The truth of Bielenberg's insight into the heightened creativity of young minds was also demonstrated this year in an electrifying lineup of Pecha Kucha speakers. The pottery of proudly local Rene Rossouw - an architect-turned-product-designer, inspired by Sowetan shacks and African fabric patterns and imbued with the flavour of her tenure in the design hub in Madrid - shows all the pedigree of previous European Indaba presenters such as Hella Jongerius and Jaime Hayon and she may just turn out to be the darling of the 2012 Indaba.
Of all truths that need unearthing, the fact that there are 270 million landmines buried in the soil of our planet is perhaps the darkest. Added together, this equates to an entire continent of unusable, uninhabitable land. Afghanistan-born Massoud Hassani, now studying at Eindhoven in Holland, has researched these statistics, as well as the current inadequate methods for retrieving even a fraction of these deadly and disfiguring devices, some of which are as small as your hand.
His statistics from countries on our own doorstep, Angola and Mozambique, and countless images of young amputees do not make for comfortable viewing. However, having mastered the art of making plastic and paper toys that he and his brother used to chase for miles in the windy region where they grew up, Hassani has succeeded in scaling up the same toy designs to create rolling detonators that are able seek and destroy landmines using windpower.
These have been successfully tested under military conditions and the near future will see him working with organsiations such as Defensie, Unicef and Landmine Action groups to fund and roll out his miraculous inventions. Will whoever said design cannot change the world please stand up?
More positive proof of world-changing possibilities were demonstrated by Alfredo Brillembourg, founder of Urban-Think Tank, who should probably run for president of the world.
As he so wisely points out, if urban growth of the future is predicted to come from the informal cities - of Latin America, of Asia and of Africa - then these cannot be seen as the problem; they must be the point of departure for all solutions. His most impressive examples work with the specific challenges of the natural environment such as the spectacular cableway system, which practically uses the power of technology to revive the quality of life in the steep slums of Caracas.
Which set me to thinking, whether it might not just be possible to start the feasibility studies for a plan of literal upliftment, of an energy efficient, elevated network hub, on stilts in Cape Town's informal suburbs, to encourage some place for the regeneration of the indigenous marshland of the region below it - organic multifunctional, high-tech, communal spaces - for art, for food, for transport, for work and play, for waste management - places of wind and water and people and birds...?
Come on, UCT Architecture School, let's see some proposals!
Here's a list of books recommended by speakers throughout the course of the day:
Little Bets by Peter Sims
Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
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