DESIGN SNIPPETS
Nothing is lost
Jason Bruges's new Memory Project is an interactive installation piece conceived to prompt thought and discussion around how we capture and store digital memories.
"With text messages replacing letters and camera phones replacing photo albums, people's memories are increasingly going digital. We understand that customers are concerned with losing their memories but that backing up can be complex," explained Sally Cowdry, marketing director of O2, the UK mobile service provider that commissioned the work to promote their simple new way of backing up cellphone content.
Physically reminiscent of a Victorian cyclorama, the Memory Project is a cylindrical structure with 11 cameras placed equidistance around its perimeter. Each of these cameras takes a picture in sequence every five seconds, creating a 360 degree, digital panorama of the outside location every minute. These images are then transmitted to giant screens on the structure's interior. Visitors can venture inside to view and interact with the images via thermal image cameras. These cameras allow visitors to "direct" which images are displayed - moving to shift the displayed images back and forwards in time , and interacting with the location's memories through gestures.
Streetwires wins entrepreneurial award
Patrick Schofield, representing Streetwires, has been awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year Momentum Lifestyle award by Top Billing magazine. This is in recognition of what Streetwires has accomplished as a social and entrepreneurial organisation: Creating over 120 full-time jobs (with on average of eight people benefiting from each job), while still being a design leader in wire and bead craft development.
Coley Porter Bell launches in SA
International branding and design company Coley Porter Bell has partnered with Ogilvy SA to launch locally. Coley Porter Bell is recognised for their trademarked offering of v!sual plann!ng, which focusses on building brands through visuals. The London agency includes the Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, Nestlé and Tesco in its brand portfolio, and the Cape Town office is already doing work for DStv, BP, Kauai and @home.
Stay the night
Architect Andrew Makin and entrepreneur Nicky Rofail have collaborated on Motel Mi Pi Chi, a new boutique hotel in Johannesburg's Melville café district.
Originally a pair of 1930s semis, Makin applied his experience in hospitality design to style the mini hotel on convenience, personal space and affordable luxury. Rofail in turn added an uplifting brightness to what has turned into an airy open-plan berth from Jozi's urban jungle.
The original wooden floors bring a homely quality to the modern chicness of the pale hotel rooms with only singular splashes of colour. Each suite's bathroom also opens on to its own private courtyard and fountain.
The large open-plan lounge and kitchen again accentuate modern convenience with cheering details - low-hanging outsized lightbulbs, green vases and a pink lounge suite complement the original Portuguese tiles and red stoep-polished fireplace.
Most widely known for the Constitutional Court, Makin's designworkshop: sa is also responsible for the Kruger National Park's Singita Lebombo and Sweni lodges, which was voted Conde Nast best hotel in the world.
Website: http://motelmipichi.co.za
Saffers hit Milan
Five Cape Town designers exhibited under the Italian Misael label during the Milan Furniture Fair.
Leora Lewis, Lyall Sprong, Rebecca Townsend, Andile Dyalvane and Heath Nash constitute the South African contingent of Misael's new project orientated towards design from the edges of the globalised market. The brainchild of Italian entrepreneurs Michael Haerens and Isable Qain, and project coordinator Monica Gentini, Misael is about limited edition products that embody their creator's passion for freshness, originality, handicraft and technology.
Old hands, Nash and Dyalvane showed their trademark recycled plastic lamps and ceramics treated with scarification, respectively. In turn, ceramicist Leora Lewis created a bowl with two feet in it, as if waiting to be washed, and glass artist Rebecca Townsend allowed herself to be inspired by throw-away domestic objects. Relative newcomer, Sprong exhibited his physics-defying Euco Bench and Alexander's Solution table.
Currently constituting 50% of the Misael project, the South African component was curated by Leonard Shapiro of CraftSouthAfrica.
Ziggy prop
The renowned Milanese gallery Post Design commissioned South Africa's London-based Ryan Frank to design an exclusive piece for this year's Milan Furniture Fair. Frank's creation is called ZiG and is a modular display/storage system made from solid bamboo. The unit's castor wheels allow for ease of movement and for the units to link into a continuous array of striking negative spaces.
Sea change
Heath Nash's Anemone light for Artecnica was also launched at this year's Milan Furniture Fair. This white lamp is packaged flat and expands into a flexible three-dimensional structure composed of interconnected geometric cells. A protective metal core isolates the bulb from the exterior, allowing for the piece to be moved and manipulated on a variety of surfaces. Tord Boontje, Enrico Bressan, Joris Laarman, Inga Sempé and Emma Woffenden also contributed to this year's Artecnica collection.
MoMa acquires local design zines
A selection of BitterKomix and BitterJusi issues have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for inclusion in their permanent collection. The editions are those on which the founders of the two publications, Anton Kannemeyer, Conrad Botes and Garth Walker, and the BitterJusi contributors, collaborated on. Said Walker: "These editions are a recognition of the value of post-apartheid South Africa visual design and our developing new graphic languages. It is a great honour for all iJusi and BitterKomix contributors to be acknowledged by MoMa."
Jupiter cracks the One Show list
The Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town has been short listed for a number of One Show Awards this year. Besides cracking the nod in the notoriously difficult radio category for the Arrive Alive campaign, their Musica "Little Britain" advert made it on to the TV short list. The 2007 Design Indaba "Ideas" TV campaign was also selected in the TV and design categories, while the Design Indaba programme made it on to the design list.
Creative Circle for Design Indaba
Design Indaba's recycled radio advert won first prize for best radio advert in the February Creative Circle awards. Created by Jupiter Drawing Room Cape Town for the Creativity Can campaign, the advert comprised old radio adverts that were spliced together.
Optical delusions
Cape Town's emo-electro outfit Unit.r have launched their debut album decked out in a full-house design campaign from illustrator Kris Hewitt aka Kronk.
Inspired by the band's unique synthesis of human and electronic sounds, Kronk decided on a style that combined geometric and organic vector illustration. For the motif he turned to the album's title - Phosphenes are the colourful 'kaleidoscopic' illusions you see when you close your eyes and press hard on them.
"The characters can be accredited to the act of seeing phosphenes, where often weird shapes, figures, images and light are seen by the viewer. The detail needed to be rich so that you could not take it all in at once and, like a phosphene, there are always new things that present themselves," explained Kronk. Creating optical illusions when presenting the characters in multiples, the designs also seem to act like colour-blind tests and chimeras.
The distinctive motif has been wholly endorsed by the band and used on the album, posters, flyers, website, T-shirts and hypnotic stage projection. "We wanted to create a visual identity that set the band apart from the current visual norm in the music industry, because the band live in a category of sound that is unlike most bands in this country. They needed to be seen as innovators in sound and visuals," Kronk goes on.
Kronk is designer and illustrator at the Amicollective and has also worked on projects for Red Bull, Kidrobot, MTV base, FNB and Virgin Mobile. His favourite colour is rainbow.
On the virtual edge
The digital revolution is about intelligent tradeoffs, according to Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, at South Africa's first Ogilvy Verge Digital Conference held in Johannesburg and Cape Town in April.
Instead of the mass media reach of the early days of TV, digital is a tradeoff with audience size for self-selectiveness, content for context, best customer for brand advocates, must-haves for personal taste, and monopoly for choice. In turn, consumers are responding with extreme tradeoffs - low-cost airlines and extravagant accommodation or cheap cigarettes and expensive coffee - calling traditional demographic metrics into question.
Sutherland concluded that the trick is to ask if one can define the audience in a different way; and Patou Nuytemans, EAME digital director of OgilvyOne Worldwide, picked up right there. "How can that audience be engaged in a different way?" she added.
When the consumer is control, it is much harder to reach them, Nuytemans reemphasised. With push marketing making way for engagement marketing, websites have become a brand's central manifestation in offering compelling, useful and pleasurable content; facilitating community and interaction; and, above all, generating word-of-mouth. "There is one mass media left... and that's the consumer," she concluded.
After all, engagement is the end-goal, digital is only the facilitator, as the Nike+iPod case study, presented by Michael Tchao, general manager of Nike Techlab, exemplified. The Nike + iPod Sport Kit acts as a personal coach that tracks and stores distance, pace and calorie data from workouts. Set to go down in the marketing halls of fame, this unprecedented case study has created a digital community that manifests in physical activity with over 85-million kilometers that have been run since its launch - it's a running revolution!
And for those local sceptics, digital media is vibrant in SA and not just used by elitist techies, confirmed Sello Leshope, Ogilvy SA's strategic planning director. "If one looks at the recent local phenomenon of Vernon Koekemoer, it speaks for itself. It was just a normal guy spotted at party that has become immortalised in cyberspace through emails, Facebook and local blog sites. Although our fixed broadband penetration is actually decreasing due to infrastructural issues, we have reached 1 million broadband users. Consumers are just hungry for local and relevant content," he explained.
The faces that find me
Dylan Culhane's Photoklecksography exhibition was inspired by Justinus Kerner and Hermann Rorschach's exploration of mirrored images. Going beyond the original monotones, Culhane's photographic illustrations present mirages of magical, terrifying, amusing, demonic and angelic creatures that could be insects, robots, aliens, spacemen, clowns, daemons, misanthropes or even panda bears. "The works are portraits of the countless doppelgangers that emerge from the depths of our collective unconscious," explains Culhane.
Design, art or soup kitchen?
Exploring the legroom between art and design, Cape Town's newest gallery - Curious, Whetstone & Frankley - has already drawn a wide range of the Mother City's favourite creatives to its freshly whited walls.
Their first "flash exhibition" - one-night events with beer on tap and affordable art - saw the likes of Hannah Morris, Jolene Kritzinger, Rikus Ferreira, Cornelius Lemmer and Tracy-lee Lynch jostling for eye space. Coming up from May 9 to 21 is Two Karens, featuring painter Karen Cronje and ceramicist Karen Kotze.
Taking its cue from the dead of Winter, from July 2 to 31 Nest will amass the likes of Jesse Breytenbach, Heather Moore, Helon Melon, Homebakes Ceramics, Janine de Waal, Gussie van der Merwe, Meld and Colleen Roberts in a celebration of the cosiness of home. Wednesday nights during July will also be Soup Kitchen nights when you can buy a designer soup bowl by Carol Bayer, Karen Kotze, Christo Giles or Liesel Trautman, and it will be filled with hot homemade soup.
"It's a brand new space for revamping old ideas or ignoring precedent completely. We'll show timeless pieces, charming anachronisms, future classics or curiosity cabinet quirks, as long as the work is well-fashioned," explain the founders of the gallery, which is situated on 87a Station Road, Observatory.
Website: www.curiouswhetstoneandfrankley.com
Watching glass grow
Ilse Doyer of Glamosa Glass and glass artist Martli Jansen van Rensburg have joined forces to promote the innovation and exploration of glass through Smelt. Launching on May 10 on the corner of Ninth Street and Rustenburg Road, Melville, Smelt will consist of a working studio, where the public can view live glass-blowing demonstrations, and a shop, which will host work by South African glass artists as well as designer glass ranges such as Molten. More info: smeltglass@hotmail.com
Designer hideaway at art fair
Billed as the world's first contemporary African art fair, the Jo'burg Art Fair welcomed 6 500 visitors through its doors from March 13 to 16. Besides 22 major gallery exhibitions, a curated show by Simon Njami, special projects by Funda Community College and Robin Rhode, a talks programme and a range of other events throughout the city, Tonic Design curated a special lifestyle and VIP area showcasing the work of some of South Africa's finest designers, including Nigel Pienaar, Haldane Martin, Whatiftheworld / Design Studio, Gregor Jenkin, Egg Design, Willowlamp and Adriaan Hugo.
Animation challenges the imagination ceiling
There was a time when the visual realm of the abstract and fantastical remained in the minds eye. These days however, with animation frames flickering faster than the blink of an eyelid and technology making animation appear more real than reality, our own imaginations are being given unprecedented leeway.
"Animation allows for the imagination to be brought to moving picture. Anything that can be created in the creative mind, no matter how weird or fantastical, can now be designed and made to move through technology," says Roger Smythe, managing director of multiple-award-winning animation studio Masters & Savant.
Smythe goes on to suggest that because animation allows for the imagination to be realised, the brain is encouraged to conceptualise even more creative and physically impossible ideas.
"The Design Indaba event promos for television are a perfect example of how animation brings to life the process of how the imagination of an inventor starts off at a fantastical point and soon develops the strange concept into usable products, such as the Kreepy Krawly. Alternatively, it can depict exactly how raw lumber can be crafted into furniture to boost an economy," Smythe explicates.
"Other concepts are as emotional as a women collecting pieces of her heart from men that broke it through her life, depicted in the recent Sissy Boy Jeans commercial, or as exciting as stone titans playing soccer, using Europe as a playing field," he goes on.
However, cultural relevance is also important, he emphasises. "It's a simple matter of your mind and the frame of reference being determined by the culture you live in. The very fact that we are African and that our entire cultural reference is based on the African experience, means that we design and animate a unique African imagination," says Smythe.
Smythe refers to the Good Hope FM Youth Day advertisement as an example, in which historical black-and-white images of freedom marches change into colourful moving images showing people dancing. "The changing culture of our society (and the reflective imagination) is illustrated in the animation on our television screens," Smythe concludes. - Greg Forbes
Remade plastic trees
South Africa's second Open Lab was held recently at the Design Quarter in Johannesburg. Brainchild of the almost year-old local chapter of international creative think tank Addictlab, the event drew participation from local and international designers.
"South Africa should be more proud of its creative talent," says Jan van Mol, Belgian founder of Addictlab. The role call included Haldane Martin, Vlaemsch, Juventa, Michaelle Janse van Vuuren, Kensaku Oshiro, Clive Rundle, Kofifi, Amanda Laird Cherry, Tempest van Schalk, Darryl Gouwes, Emile Kotze, Melanie Brummer and Mtkidu.
Van Mol himself contributed the Urban Forest light installation. Consisting of objects shaped like irregular tree trunks and made from recycled plastic, the installation criticises the world's consumption attitude. The built-in LED lights can change colour depending on the atmosphere, soundscapes, seasons or any other emotions linked to the location of the forest or reason for gathering. The inside can also be used as drinks cooler, turning the light objects into a lounge accessory, guerrilla tool or design object.
2 000 designs for 100 year anniversary
As part of the University of Pretoria's centenary celebrations, more than 2 000 designs by alumni will be exhibited in the X-ings: Shaping Culture Through Design exhibition until May 24. All graduates of the university's information design course, expect the likes of New York-based hat designer Albertus Quartus Swanepoel; film and stage designers Johan Engels and Birrie le Roux; doyenne of pewter Carrol Boyes; advertising and magazine icons Sumien Brink, Anton Sassenberg and Francois de Villiers; designer of the South African Coat of Arms, Iaan Bekker; and design promoter Adrienne Viljoen.
Blossoming furniture
Klein Dytham Architecture designed, developed and produced this outdoor furniture in just a month for the Tokyo Mid-Town development's first anniversary cherry blossom party. "Simply sculpted from blocks of polystyrene, the seats and tables are coated with a urethane surface, which spreads the pressure and stops people in kimonos from puncturing the polystyrene with their chop sticks," explained Mark Dytham.
Robot gets fieldtrip
Chris Saunders and Murray Turpin have collaborated to create a virtual robot digitally assembled out of about 50 photographs of construction equipment. In turn, the pair took their robot on a road trip through the backwaters between Johannesburg and Cape Town. They will be showing photographic documentation of their robot's fieldtrip at the Exposure Gallery from May 9 to June 10. Website: www.exposuregallery.co.za
Public art award announced
Kevin Brand, artist and educator from Cape Town, scooped the Mercedes-Benz South Africa 2008 Art Award for an Art Project in Public Spaces. "He has been a significant commentator on South African society for almost 30 years," explained the jury of the award (previously known as the DaimlerChrysler Award). His work, along with that of the other seven finalists, will be exhibited in Berlin, Pretoria and Stellenbosch.
A body of plants
Fashion design team duo Strangelove, Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater, collaborated with Leora Farber on her Dis-Location/Re-Location exhibition, which explored how cultural identities are formed, redefined and hybridised. The exhibition has toured seven galleries across the country and will complete its run at the Durban Art Gallery from July 27 to May 15.
Inn harness
Ilse Crawford has cast her enchanting touch across the English inn, using country materials such as rush matting, tweed and hand-crafted pewter plates. Sourcing furniture such as these Ercol chairs from nearby High Wycombe (once the chair making capital of UK), the high backs have been covered with traditional boldly patterned Welsh blankets, strapped on by leather saddle belts. The Olde Bell Inn in Hurley Berkshire will launch the brand in June.
Paper architect under the hammer
Japanese starchitect Shigeru Ban's Paper Tea House reached £31 700 at a Phillips de Pury and Company auction of contemporary Japanese art. Designed for indoor use and measuring just over 5m, the house contains a table and four stools, and also features a waiting area with a bench, in keeping with tea ceremony practice. Unusual in Ban's paper architecture oeuvre, the house uses an interlocking square structure, rather than the typical tubes.
One thing that leads to another thing
The Things is a new cartoon strip by Spike Kunene and Khaya Dlanga, copywriters at Metropolitan Republic. They came up with the idea of The Things one day while fooling around, as they often do. The cartoons have no point, besides being stupid, while amusing at the same time. The cartoons are only on the Internet so far, with a following of more than 600 fans on Facebook. But they are hoping for bigger things and have roped in a young rascal by the name Loyiso Madinga and a retoucher called Dale Mullany.
Green-themed competition for students
This year's Lafarge Design Award: Perfect Plasterboard Complete Design Competition is now open for entry by all tertiary-level design or architecture students. In line with Lafarge's prioritisation of sustainability and environmental concerns, this year's competition is themed around a Hyper Green concept and entails completing a building in a game reserve. Tertiary institutions are invited to submit the top three student entries by August 18. More info on Tel: 011 485 2680.
Get a red dot
The red dot award: communication design invites designers, advertising agencies and clients of communication designers from all over the world to submit their entries and face up to international comparison in one of the most severe design competitions in the world. Entries can be submitted until June 13 at www.red-dot.de.
SABS Design Excellence Award scheme
South African product designers are invited to submit entries for the 2008 SABS Design Excellence Awards. There are six categories - home and office ware, medical and healthcare, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, transport, automotive, and mining and machinery - as well as a host of other awards. To enter, the product must have been on the market for a year or more.
Running at the same time is the SABS Design Institute's Prototype Initiative where product designers with working prototype models will have the opportunity to get advice on how to get their prototypes out of the garage and on the way to production. Confidential consultations with a small panel of design experts, designers and engineers will take place from July 7 to 11.
Deadlines for both initiatives are May 15. Visit www.designinstitute.org.za for more information and to enter.
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