It's a (square) wrap #designindaba

Carla Fernandez

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Mexican designer and founder of Taller Flora fashion label, Carla Fernandez, did stand out, though, as she described how she finds inspiration in traditional Mexican clothing design and textiles.

Fernandez points out that, while many from the poorest communities in her country work with textiles, she could not get a bursary to design fashion, as fashion design is not considered a priority by the Mexican government. Today Fernandez provides jobs to co-ops run by women in various Mexican villages where she helps keep relevant (and profitable) traditional cloth backstrap weaving methods.

Local indigenous communities make use of squares and rectangles (it requires less tailoring, so less skill and wastage) in their clothing and Fernandez has integrated these designs into a modern and unique line of designer clothing.

She has a PDF booklet out describing her design and production process - click here to download (4.5 megs). For Fernandez, handmade clothing tells the story of the maker and her community and empowers rural women by acknowledging their skill and design sensibilities.

Mark Shuttleworth

Billionaires are not as rare as they used to be. When one sits on the stairs next to you (he came in late and could not find a seat), the rebel in you smirks. A less reputable part wonders what he would be willing to pay you for your seat. Mark Shuttleworth has no airs, which was partly where Martha Stewart went wrong last year, and the slight English accent he is developing doesn't detract from his Ayobaness.

Shuttleworth described how he injected design into fabric of his open source Ubuntu operating system to take it mainstream. Ubuntu is a case study in collaboration, and designing its interface was also an open source, collaborative process. The focus going forward will be on the user experience - judging from the slides, Ubuntu will make messages, toolbars and other bits and pieces that take up your screen real estate disappear when you don't need them, and reappear when you do, now only to make people brave enough to skip the pre-installed Windows software on their computers. Oh and in the future? Search will be the interface for everything - files and folders are just too chaotic.

Oded Ezer

Typoholic, typographic shaman and world-famous type designer Oded Ezer talked a lot, and a lot of nonsense, but his typographic design is pretty fantastic. He also inspired the best tweet of the Indaba by @beanbagboy: "Oded Ezer: the Lady Gaga of Typography #DesignIndaba."

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Source

Jacob Zuma

The president made a guest appearance on the elevator en-route to the neighbouring auditorium where a UN sustainability meeting was taking place. He was flanked by untold numbers of heavies in black. It was pretty snazzy. I was struck by how alike he looks to Jonathan Shapiro (cartoonist Zapiro), there to hand one of the guest speakers their platinum pin. Minus the shower head, of course. Heading back into rush hour traffic and out of Cape Town, I spotted the presidential motorcade readying for departure. I could not help but notice the scraped paint work on one of the outriders - as a design concept it was pretty effective. I was out of there in no time.

The End

Design Indaba ended with a feel-good presentation on why Google is great. I'm relieved the identity of The Founder, to whom Robert Wong, creative director of Google Creative Labs, referred several times, wasn't revealed. There are enough deities in the world as it is. Talking of which, Hugh Masekela pitched as the day's mystery speaker. I stopped taking notes at that point, sat back, and finally just took it all in. Amen.

For more:

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