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EDITORIAL
Greetings! It’s almost 10 years since the seeds
of Design Indaba were sown, and it’s been an
amazing journey. What started as an
opportunity to celebrate design and to fasttrack
South Africa’s readmission into the
global marketplace, has evolved into a
vanguard that goes way beyond the flagship
event at the end of February. It has become a
24/7/365 obsession that aims to grow the
creative industries in South Africa and now
incorporates events, media, education and
training, business development and an
advocacy group to business, government and
society.
Our strategic trinity is: Inspiration, Education
and Beneficiation! More and more we know
that, to be more relevant to contemporary South
Africa, we have to go beyond ideas and
concepts and leverage design into job creation
and growing the economy. And we learnt from
our research that the creative industries can be a
huge impetus to the economy. For example, in a
recent study commissioned by the Mayor of
London entitled: Creativity, London’s core
business, it was stated that the creative industry
was the second-biggest contributor to the
regional GDP of London, and one of the fastest
growth areas for job creation. Interestingly, it
contributes £21-billion to the London economy,
and the majority of companies in this sector
were small to medium enterprises. Clearly this is
of huge relevance to a resurgent South Africa,
and we can take heed. Growth of the creative
industries should be a strategic imperative in our
country.
In this issue, apart from featuring forthcoming
Design Indaba attractions like Karim Rashid,
David Carson and Mary Lewis, we will
showcase two extensions to the Design Indaba
story. The first is the Design Indaba Workshop
Series, which is growing from strength to
strength and from city to city. In essence, it adds
a global view to design education in South
Africa, and brings out top-flight international
designers to conduct interactive workshops at
local institutions. We have learnt from our first
four workshops, and thought that we should
now consolidate this into a coherent, cohesive
national programme. We recently travelled to
every major design institution in the country:
Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Port Elizabeth, East
London, Bloemfontein, Durban, Johannesburg
and Pretoria. We were buoyed by the response
of all the design educators nationwide and learnt
that it may be worthy to co-ordinate workshops
for the lecturers as well: train the trainer could
be the new refrain! In the month of September
2003 we facilitated the Design Indaba Workshop
Series Goes Dutch events, with world-renowned
Irma Boom (also a Professor of Design at Yale
University, no less!) and Joost Alferink
conducting workshops in Bloemfontein, Pretoria
and Cape Town. You can read more about this
on pages 63.
And the big news is that the Design Indaba
Workshop Series will take place 12 times a year
at select tertiary institutions throughout the
country as of May 2004. As before, each
workshop will be facilitated by one of the
world’s top designers - usually a former
international Design Indaba speaker – and
consists of up to five days of creative
brainstorming, training, production and
refinement around a specific brief. The end
product is a tangible product - a brochure, a
book or a bag, for example - that can be used in
each participant’s portfolio.
Through the Design Indaba Workshops we will
get to meet more than 5000 students from all
over South Africa - the perfect opportunity to
identify talented young designers who deserve
further development. For those who aren't
design students but would nonetheless like to
hear our world-class designers speak, two open
plenary sessions are held during the course of
each workshop. The first session will be open to
all students and staff from the hosting institution,
and the second will be open to all design
professionals in the locale.
The second development is the Design Indaba
Expo, featured on page 67. It will be
inaugurated at next year's event at the Cape
Town International Convention Centre. The idea
is simple - we will showcase the best of South
African design across product design, fashion
design, interiors, architecture, film and video,
new media and graphic design. Our target
market, beyond the Design Indaba delegate,
will be international buyers and journalists, as
well as the general public. We want to ensure
that we have more discerning customers in
South Africa, as they will force producers to raise
the bar, thereby ensuring South Africa's
competitiveness (a Michael Porter strategem,
designed to ensure that we adapt to create a
locus of excellence in design). Interestingly, the
Design Indaba Expo will celebrate the innovator,
and not the sales agent - so we will place the
designer upfront and centre, and not someone
who has the marketing rights for some groovy
lava lamp, for example.
So we have more work to do. But we are taking
a punt, and putting all our resources into the
creative industries - we are of the opinion that
creativity is the "X" factor that will take our
GDP growth rate from two to six percent!
Ciao
Email Ravi your feedback
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