The new plastic surgery from Design Indaba

From designing fragrance packaging for Calvin Klein to transforming papier-mâché art out of Mandela Park into Capellini Love tables for global Italian furniture purveyors - designers like New York-based Stephen Burks, in collaboration with hands-on craft from the street, are smashing previous geographic, economic and material boundaries.

Collaboration with Willard Musaswara from Feeling Africa has enabled what started out as a struggling Long Street wire-art business, to grow into an exporting enterprise, employing 10 people and being distributed by retail outlets such as Weylandts. Association with Alison Coutras of Kunye African and the Cape Craft & Design Institutes has also allowed Burks to be instrumental in ensuring that plastic waste, destined for landfill sites, now transforms ubiquitous white garden furniture.

Also being incredibly young gifted and recyclable is the Parisian collaborative outfit 5.5 Design - www.cingcingdesigners.com. A furniture hospital is the scene as four of them, in white coats, complete with waiting rooms and all the clinical accoutrements, minister to sick old furniture destined for landfill.

Then, people's perceptions of value are changed, via the highly successful Save a Product Campaign, which last year saw people queueing up at trestle-style retail outlets, as in Milan, to buy very ordinary plastic homewares recalled by the manufacture for dumping, for €1 each.
The ingenious addition of an emotive Save a Product sticker, ensures "stuff" suddenly becomes collectible. Design is marketing, marketing is design - QED

Bringing it all together is the impassioned plea of Canadian Bruce Mau, from the Institute without Boundaries, whose maxim is: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, inciting us to make the most of the fact that, if the inconvenient truth must be told again and again, the status quo no longer actually serves us. His brief? To reassess, revaluate, renew and restore your processes for the greater good - somewhere in your operations there's an opportunity. Massive Change projects are Mau's oversized baby. If you have time on your hands you can get involved. Go to http://www.massivechange.com/about.