Overview of #daytwo of DIXIV: a ‘chair’ kind of day

If you’ve ever attended Design Indaba before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that yesterday, Thursday, 24 February 2011, was a ‘chair’ kind of day - painted ones, vintage ones, recycled ones, burnt ones, wonky ones, rapid prototyped extruded ones formed from recycled fridge casings by robotic arms... you get the picture. You can learn the history of the world from its chairs, but there was also a whole lot more going down, at this, the second leg of the XIVth annual Design Indaba. [view twitterfall]

Dieter Rams is the most influential industrial designer of the 20th century; Apple would not be what it is today without him_Biblioteque

In pursuit of contextualising the collective design heritage of the world via its made objects, some noteworthy presentations yesterday included that of British design trio Biblioteque, who get totally immersed in their work on many different kinds of museum installation projects. The one for Dieter Rams catalogues, in exhaustive detail, the work of the man who was head of design at German electronics giant Braun for 30-odd years.

It is the preservation of this kind of content that is the designer’s legacy. We were not born fully formed into the arms of social media – we have evolved to this point and it is more often than not worth remembering.

Design is a new form of art and poetry, the last link in a much longer chain going back to the British Arts & Crafts Movement, the Wiener Werkstätte, the Deutsche Werkbund, the Glasgow School of Arts and Crafts, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Bauhaus_Alberto Alessi

Staying with history, the evolution of European design was nowhere more poetically told than via the archival photographs of the Alessi family shown by third generation Alberto. From their rural roots in Northern Italy, the family have been crafters of fine metal and wooden household objects for three generations before Spilhaus even hit the mall.

With a presentation of design collaborations over the decades that reads like a who’s who of high end metalwork – from Salvador Dali to Richard Sapper, Michael Graves and Philippe Starke - you become aware that you are in the presence of the kind of design aristocracy before whom you can only stand in awe.

And, speaking of aristocracy, to mark his 80th birthday, Massimo Vignelli was serenaded by the glorious Watoto Children’s Choir , on its six-month national tour to raise awareness and funds for the 47.5million orphans of Africa. The inconvenient fact of which links us back to the reality of the enormity of the tasks ahead of us, in design and elsewhere.

We’re ready, little ones, with all the colour and joy of Africa bursting through your veins; we will not fail you, armed as we are with all the inspiration and the feeling, imbued in all who attend Design Indaba, that it is possible to change the world.

Imagine a child-friendly city_ Kiran Bir Sethi

One person who’s done it for the children in a huge way, is the incredibly amazing Kiran Bir Sethi from Ahmedabad, India. The driving ethos of the education model she has piloted is to challenge what she calls “an obsolete, redundant pedagogy” and to put the student back at the centre of learning by asking: “Who is a child? What is childhood? How long is it? How can our choices empower children?”

The answers take the form of projects that set about changing the doubtful “Can I?” into the enabled “I can!” Examples include giving 6th and 7th graders the project of arranging an international conference. Visuals see excited, motivated children enquiring after venue hire on Skype, raising finances, inviting parents, planning the programme and running the whole event.

Other initiatives see the children interacting with differently-abled children, identifying the difficulties they experience, their lack of access to facilities, and deciding on an auction of their art to be done in collaboration with all the children, as a means to raise funds.

The Streetsmart project, whereby authorities are persuaded to close selected streets to cars in order to make way for child-friendly activities such as street painting, magicians, obstacle courses etc, is a particularly touching example of what is possible in a child-centric society that cares. Sending older children into disadvantaged schools to act as one-on-one teachers reveals beautiful moments, simply reaffirming the child as protagonist of his own life and showing that anything is possible.

Be the change you want to see in the world_Mahatma Gandhi

In a Design Indaba context, anything does actually seem possible - flying to the moon without leaving your living room, creating a Transkei-based global knitwear empire, digitally controlling the game of life or building furniture by means of vintage robots – as demonstrated by seven of the planet’s top design graduates, in today’s Pecha Kucha format session.

The pressing theme of improved healthcare was again in evidence today. Rhode Island graduate Lindsay Kincade presented ways in which she works with design students to ensure they have the tools for making public healthcare policy requirements visual and comprehensible to stakeholders, via design.

As an aside, I have familiarised myself with our Government’s 10-point healthcare plan and its corresponding R113 billion budget projections for 2011 and can’t help wondering whether any of that will be allocated to the creation of a better service provider and patient experience by design.

Perhaps some of it will be going to Christine Goudie, graduate of Carleton University in Ottowa Canada, who is choosing to devote her career to “assistive devices”. Her fledgling company, Adapt, which has been responsible for designing a drastically improved wheelchair seating solution, has already won an award for innovation from the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Goudie has identified that less than 2% of people in Africa who need wheelchairs have access to them, perhaps offering a major opportunity to leapfrog old technologies in favour of new.

In this regard, a whole new nomenclature opens up that sees designers collaborating with biomechanical engineers and other disciplines. “But it’s not only disability design that’s inadequate,” she offers, “there are fundamental flaws in most products which we use in our everyday lives.”

Laduma Ngxokolo, a graduate of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in the Eastern Cape, has been inspired by the Amakrwale ritual to introduce Xhosa tradition to a new generation who are in search of the knitwear they are required to purchase after burning all their old clothes as part of their initiation ceremonies. Identifying that locally, available knitwear choices such as Pringle and other imported brands bore no resemblance to the Xhosa tradition, he started experimenting with geometric Xhosa patterns and colours, which he found to be ideally suited to his chosen craft of machine knitting.

In this way, Ngxokolo is preserving culture; stimulating the value chain for the Eastern Cape Mohair resource of which 75% is exported due to insufficient textile industry in South Africa; making things more viable for small farmers; and winning himself numerous awards in the process – not bad for a jumper.

But then this is no ordinary jumper: the breathtakingly gorgeous design is a strong contender for the “Most Beautiful Objects” award, currently running at Design Indaba Expo.

For more Pecha Kucha case studies, I found this really comprehensive link on coolhunting.com.