[Design Indaba conf] Overview of day three

The last day of the 2010 Design Indaba conference, Friday, 26 February 2010, turned out to be one of highs and lows, which saw standing ovations for three acts, a mass walk out for one and a medical emergency which briefly halted proceedings. The day also saw the tipping the gender scales, with an eclectic lineup of women - well-known Dutch trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, product designer Christien Meindertsma, Chinese fashion designer Han Feng and American entrepreneur Martha Stewart... [view twitterfall]

Li Edelkoort - stand by me

Introduced by a vuvuzela blast and a movie showing clips of artists from all around the world all performing the old Ben E King standard, "Stand by Me" which, according to Li , was "about us and what's happening to us".

How so? Well, changing cityscapes and irreversible new value systems give rise to new interconnected relationships within flattening landscapes of power and the individual becoming less important than what they can bring to the group; we will also be seeing the effects, in both architecture and design, of our deepening relationship to the earth, animals and each other.

Trends towards ruralisation and virtualisation explain the popularity of Farmville [that app on Facebook... – acting editor, farm styling, farm animals, farm produce, authenticity, irregularity and anything that flies, flutters or fluffs will be coming through in design.

Han Feng - I, fashion designer

Hailing from China, Han Feng put the C in the BASIC acronym currently in use to describe the emerging economies of the world [which includes us]. An amazing kind of "rags to rags" story, from her origins in Nanjing during the cultural revolution, where everybody wore blue and green and there was no fashion, to her arrival in New York in 1985, speaking no English, but managing to work her way up at Bloomingdales Dept store - from sales, to buying, using scraps off the cutting room floors to make scarves which she carried in a basket to a shop in Soho to earn her first US$5000 and birth of the Han Feng fashion label.

Meeting Anthony Minghella [whose wife loved Han's clothes] and whose film The English Patient Han had, coincidentally, seen three times, led to the assignment to design costumes for the English National Opera House' production of Madame Butterfly. Costumes for Handel's Semele, Amy Tan's the Bonesetter's Daughter and the forthcoming costumes for Columbia/Sony Pictures Karate Kid followed.

She says she never expected much, only that her life be "a bit better than my mother's". We were lucky enough to see it all on the big screen, but you can still get some idea of her incredible gift for evocative silhouettes and colours at http://hanfeng.com/picture/index.php?cid=26.

Christien Meindertsma - "one sheep, one cardigan"

Perfectly celebrating Li Edelkoort's farming predictions, with her gingham shirt, milkmaid complexion and agriculturally themed work, Christien demonstrates the trend for all things woolly, with witty cardigans made from the wool of a single sheep, each with a passport of origin and the type of rosette that farm animal are awarded at agricultural shows.

Also impressive is her work in Belgian flax - using both traditional and industrial methods of rope making, her essential ball of flax ottomans and rope lights, complete with the original wooden block and tackle details reminiscent of Dutch maritime heritage, are intensely covetable.

At this stage she is most famous for two things - for her incredible knitted ottomans, for knitting a cabled Aran rug 5m long on giant knitting needles, which she made herself, and for her multi award-winning book, PIG 05049, an academic treatise which traces the commercial applications and uses of every part of just one of Holland's 12 million pigs in a whimsical catalogue style. Pig parts end up in places as diverse as inkjet paper, concrete, marshmallows, heart valves, car paint and even as dough improver in bread. Each item photographed in the relevant section, with skin naturally, as the cover. For more, go to www.christienmeindertsma.com.

Martha Stewart - glitter-by-numbers

Publishing magnate Martha Stewart has succeeded in turning her stable of glossy homemakers magazines - Martha Stewart Living, -Wedding, -Body&Soul and -Everyday Food into an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now also with online, TV talk show and social media formats, employing 75 chefs, 20 home decorators, dozens of craftspeople and four horticulturalists whose function it is to supply recipes and content for the above channels.

She has five houses, three Himalayan cats, two French Bulldogs and 200 of the South American Araucana chicken breed, which lay the subtly coloured eggs that have inspired her extensive household paints ranges named after things they love - French Bulldog Black, Cakestand Blue and so on.

Recently, having branched out into the glitter business in a bid to channel some of the US's $30 billion craft industry, there's a website where you can upload your favourite photos to be transformed into a handy glitter [pronounced glidder]-by-numbers template.

In the name of design, Martha herself has glittered a portrait of her French Bulldog Sharkey - [the other one is called Francesca] who is named after her stylist Kevin - they even have their own blog http://dailywag.marthastewart.com.

Another fave crafting technique is Faux Bois [French for False Wood] - an antique European art form designed to get concrete to look like wood! There's absolutely nothing that can't be given the Faux Bois treatment and Martha's dining room has been a design inspiration to thousands with its faux boix'd closet doors and floors. You can, with the aid of a special Faux Bois roller, get paper to look like wood and even chairs, cupcake frosting and flower containers can be enhanced by this treatment.

If you want to feel utterly inadequate about never having stencilled a curtain or made a valance out of men's handkerchiefs visit Martha's world at www.marthastewart.com but also see also Martha Stewart: what went wrong? and Martha Stewart flamed.

Alejandro Aravena - "our scarcest resource is not money; it's coordination"

The multi-awarded Chilean architect says, when he thought a chair could not get any simpler, he saw a nomadic Indian, who would have no use for a chair, sitting on the ground - and strives to apply the same irreducible thinking to his architecture.

Apart from showing amazing educational campuses he has designed in the Americas, his presentation was based around a more profound problem, that of our soon coming face-to-face with critical mass in cities around the world. To meet the growth of urbanisation our solutions are going to have to be "quick and massive". Can we do it?

One of the major problems he has identified is that, up to now, poor people coming into cities end up where land is worth nothing, the material with which they build their houses is worth nothing and, as a result, do not benefit from appreciation of any land grants for which they may initially have been eligible and which everyone else in the property chain takes for granted.

By means of a combination of equations based on human needs, budgets and densities in consultation with the community, Aravena's landmark case study shows how the households of the poor can gain the value that allow them to raise loans, buy a sewing machine or start a business. [Unfortunately it was in the middle of this presentation that someone took ill and we lost 10 minutes while we waited anxiously for the medical attention and to hear whether the person was alright before continuing - they were!].

Anyway, the strategy has been a success - the new, beautifully designed housing, built for US$7500 has been valued at US$20 000!

They have since duplicated the model for Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation for New Orleans and other projects. It was for this that he garnered the first standing ovation of the day. This is not just talk, this is do; in fact the whole initiative is called DO TANK.

One piece of good news is that his partner has just been appointed vice housing minister of Chile and thus will be able to be involved in policy making there; another is that there may be the possibility for them to consult on the same kinds of systems to be implemented here! [It is so bizarre writing about Chilean housing projects just a day before the terrible news of the earthquake and tsunami in that region have just hit the headlines!]

Protofarm 2050

Staying with the theme of solving the world's problems, six individuals and collectives were invited to submit, let's call them "green sky" proposals, in a Pecha Kucha format, to see how we as designers might respond biologically, socially or culturally to extreme resource scarcity caused by predictions of the doubling of our world population by 2050.

5.5 designers - "is it possible to make a presentation pertinent for 40 years time?

The darlings of 2009 Design Indaba were back, suggesting we change our relationship with food, focusing on the hunting of abundant urban food sources such as rat, pigeon, cockroach, starlings, snails and weeds - showing cleverly design hunting accoutrements, the funniest of which was the cobble print cape which allows you to be camouflaged in city squares where pigeons hang out.

Fiona Raby - "a flower will be hard to justify economically, possibly ethically"

RCA faculty member, Design Indaba 2009 alumnus and half of Interaction Design team Dunne & Raby, Fiona Raby went the biological route, showing high end graphics of really uncomfortable science fiction visuals that would see us using new techniques in bioengineering to adapt our digestive systems to be able to assimilate more varieties of sustenance in bizarre and tubular ways; the intensive sowing of wild foods [such as mushrooms, berries and wild salads], currently already in progress by the Scottish Forestry Commission and the use of biological principles such as using pea plants to add nitrogen content to depleted soil [as a matter of interest, this is a common practice in permaculture circles in South Africa and our own Keurboom is in fact a member of the Polygala or pea family and probably should be used more widely].

Frank Tjepkema - Oogst

More Dutch efficiency - astonishingly The Netherlands is the third largest agricultural exporter after America and France! Product and interior designer, Tjepkema, chose the name Oogst for his presentation, because it means harvest in Dutch and sounds fabulous in English. Revisiting the Biosphere concept - the failed social experiment by Texas oil producer to lock a handful of people into closed system for seven years to see if there was a way to support life on Mars - with hindsight comments, Frank, they missed the opportunity to add a few cameras and make it the world's first educational Big Brother.

Anyway, he has calculated that in order to be completely independent, one person needs 200m² of land and has developed a schematic patchwork pattern with a windmill at the centre of a thousands of life sustaining modular tracts, where there are no roads, banks or ads and every square metre of land is made productive. For more, go to www.tjep.com/studio.html.

Revital Cohen - electrocyte appendix - stop being Homo Sapiens and become Homo Evolutous

Having blown us away in last year's Design Indaba Student showcase, RCA graduate and arguably on one of the finest minds in design today, Revital Cohen was back with more super-bionic solutions. It is our human desire to generate electricity out of nature -wind, solar etc she says - yet electricity can also be produced organically, for example, electric eels.

Tracking down like-minded researcher David Lavan at NIST, she revealed that they are working on similar objectives to help people run pacemakers and so on. Asking leading questions such as how many "electric" cells would it take to generate how much electricity? If form follows function how should it be wired? What does it need? Where would you put it? Revital arrived at the solution of replacing the useless human appendix and replacing it with something we really need - a power point in our own bodies - that converts blood sugar to electricity. It's fantastic.

Protofarm 2050: Electrocyte Appendix from Design Indaba on Vimeo.

Futurefarmers - farming will revert to what it was like 100 years ago

I must admit it was hard to follow this presentation. Futurefarmers stick to their low carbon objectives and choose not fly - coming to us via satellite, their multiple presentations were disjointed and hard to follow. Suffice to say, they are radically green and advocate teaching kids that farming is a respectable profession, and that it should be made illegal for anybody to own more the 20 acres of land, or for a family not to own one acre of land and see farming reverting to what it was 100 years ago. For more, go to www.futurefarmers.com.

Shout - Danny Kaye and Kabelo

Little did we know that we were shortly about to be party to the second standing ovation of the day - a bold new voice in the fight against crime, Creative Activists Net#work BBDO, Danny K and Kabelo have put together a music video remix of the Tears for Fears 80s' anthem, SHOUT!.

Inspired by the death of their friend Lucky Dube, the video features a host of beloved ZA musicians in a beautifully produced version aimed at providing the very necessary voice to fight for a safer South Africa. The SHOUT! Foundation will launch at Nelson Mandela Theatre on 16 March and there will website downloads and concerts that will need your support in a "triumphant, loud, bold and positive" initiative to activate responsible citizenship. Come on!

Handspring Puppet Company - "up-to-the-minute 17th century technology"

Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler are puppeteers, or what they call emotional engineers. The last 16 years have seen them play all over the world to acclaim. Currently playing to sold-out audiences at London's National Theatre [sold out till until 2011!], their latest venture, War Horse, is based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo.

Live on the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) stage at this year's Design Indaba were the original hyena from the 1994 Kentridge collaboration, Faustus in Africa; the 5m high star of the Tall Horse Mali puppet collaboration and the incredible Warhorse - delayed by one week on his journey to join the Cirque du Soleil in Micau, China.

The lifelike puppets are made with bamboo and aluminium in Capricorn Park, Cape Town. Fine controls move ears, eyes and tails separately to allow maximum expressive movement, but it is in their uncanny lifelike motion that these structures fully embody the spirit of the animal. Needless to say, it was they that drew the rousing third Standing O of the day.

ZA News - the SABC lawyers wanted to sue e.tv for showing clips of a show commissioned by the SABC - SA politics in a nutshell - Zapiro

Thierry Cassuto and Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro are media magnates in the making. After years of false starts, false promises and false witnesses, the channels to market for the show, modelled on international examples of latex puppet political satires such as the British Spitting Image of the 80s and French Les Guignols de l'info, has... finally... arrived! You can't keep an irreverent sponsor down and Kulula.com has found the perfect vehicle in ZANews.

Other patrons of a jolly good laugh are Avusa and Summit TV, from this week bringing you season two of ZANews on Summit DStv Channel 412 daily at 9.55pm, with a repeat at 7.35am the following day.

Apart from the usual suspects, a host of new characters such as Charlize, Carlos Alberto Ferreira, Zuma on the Couch and comeback kid Eugene Terreblanche will be just some of the appearances you can expect on ZANews. The new website is heavily weighted towards participation, so if you love Zapiro, ZA talent and ZAnews, there's loads of ways to connect, so go to www.zanews.co.za.

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