Design Indaba, day 2 - the battle of the animators

Wicked Pixels MTN stickies man commercial.

Work from the Blackheart Gang, close up.

Animators with a passion

The second morning of Design Indaba 2009, saw an unintentional battle of the animators, with Craig Wessels of Wicked Pixels, the company responsible for the current Design Indaba TV commercial (they also collaborated with The Jupiter Drawing Room CPT on the current Design Indaba campaign), Roger Smythe from Masters & Savant, and Jannes Hendrikz and Markus Wormstorm of the The Blackheart Gang, all fairly claiming to be the most awarded animation studio in South Africa. The South African animation industry itself emerged as the overall winner however, with all the presenters worthy of as many local and international awards as have been bestowed on them, making us all truly proud of this home-grown showcase of work.

Harnessing a new fluidity

Back in the real world, David Boira and Zoe Coombes of Cmmwlth (http://www.commonwealth.nu/about) bring one of the most intellectual approaches to rapid prototyping ever - gaining an impressive handle on how a variety of materials will translate into small-scale digital production, playing with forms out of plywood, bronze, bamboo and a cool, paper-based material called Richlite, as well as firing computer generated graphics onto cast ceramics in their industrial studio space in Brooklyn, New York which is part lab, part art gallery and part interior design company.

And Zen…
If... you were ever looking for a definition of Zen, you might find it embodied in the processes of Dai Fujiwara, Creative Director for global fashion engineer Issey Miyake.

APOC stands for A Piece Of Cloth and is a system of continuous tubes of fabric, within which lie both shape and pattern of the finished garment ensuring minimum waste. Fashion meets travelogue in video footage of recent Colourhunting trip to the Amazon jungle, showing an exhaustive process of matching tiny colour fabric strips to every hue of mud, leaf, flower, bark and swamp and then the stringing of these hundreds of selected swatches like miniature bunting across the watercourses by canoe. Where you can't see the swatches, the colour is matching perfectly with the background - and only these, the subtlest of shades, are the ones that make it into the collection... The task to design suits for Japan's male and female karate masters, demonstrates the full measure of Fujiwara's skills - a latticework of pleats across the garment and sleeves allowing a flow of movement by the wearer as precise, flexible and economical as the karate kata itself.

A cut above all

Japanese culture has also been very influential in the work of Ferran Adria who was voted Best Chef in the World 2008.

Ferran Adria, the world's best.

He's so popular that his restaurant, ElBulli, which has been awarded title of The World´s Best Restaurant, can only accommodate 8000 of the million or so reservation requests it receives every year! It still seems unreal that such a person was really in our midst today for his standing ovation - and is hard to imagine how avant garde food must be to attain this kind of status, suffice to say that science and technology, passion, precision and every combination of design, colour, texture, form and temperature are enshrined in his dishes. They are alternately vaporous, gelatinous, fluffy, foamy, cloudy, earthy, bulbous, yarnous, crystalline, tubular, pleated, crumpled, layered, syringed, spun, dribbled and sprayed and the colours and formations are sublime, but I guess we're unlikely to ever know what it tastes like...
Parmesan jelly does sound fabulous. The hardest part about creativity is to be honest and to never copy anybody else, says Adria. Feast your eyes on http://www.elbulli.com.

Wanders wonders

You're unlikely to believe this but, so entranced was I with Marcel Wanders interiors and objects that all thoughts of food were utterly forgotten - it turns out, that all my favourite and most lusted after objects of the past few years, all those pics I cut out of magazines to use on my talk boards, are his!

A piece of Marcel Wanders inspired work.

I swoon for the bowl lamp with embossing inside, the ceiling height "table" lamps, the baroque "I hate camping" outdoor range for Puma. His latticed, lasered, mosaiced, mirrored and yes, decorated revivalist modernist interiors and architectural solutions, in black and white and acid yellow, are to this author, the epitome of good taste now - every piece a considered gift for the eye and the soul.