Dimitri on Day 2 of the Design Indaba

Mary Lewis shared some wonderfully elegant British design and insights into developing successful brands, while Shigeo Fukuda blew the audience away with a dizzying array of optical illusions and extremely intricate works of art.

South African Happy Ntshingila offered some new perspectives on design ... describing problem solving as being it's central function. He also urged the abolition of Ndebele patterns from SA design - a sentiment which I'm sure was felt by most attendees.

After an animated "postcard" from Xavier Mariscal, one of last year's speakers, it was Bob Sabiston's turn to wow us with his animated work. His is a unique style that developed from his personally-built software that allows one to create animations over live video footage within relatively small timeframes. The results are hypnotic, almost hallucinatory and always very expressive.

Rashied Din opened up the world of retail branding and architecture, using examples such as FCUK and the immense project of creating an identity for the Terminal 5 building in Heathrow Airport.

At the "Design: A Force for Good" workshop South African designers Peet Pienaar, Veejay Archary and Richard Hart discussed the social responsibility that designers face and shared some of the non-commercial work that they were involved in ... this included a performance piece by Pienaar where we watched a car sliding across a young man's face painted onto the gravel parking lot.

Peter Saville closed the day with a somewhat cynical view of design and casually described his career in an honest and anecdotal manner. Although some delegates may have found his talk depressing, others found a more realistic perspective on design and perhaps learnt some lessons in steering the local industry, or even their own careers, into the right direction.

Construction New Media Awards

Although the awards ceremony was rather poorly organised and not very well attended (besides some of the nominees), it was nonetheless a valid showcase of new media talent, and it offered necessary recognition to some very impressive interactive projects from around the world.