A response to urgent demands

Design Indaba in Cape Town is a major crea­tive conference on the African continent. Much like a TED event on the subject of design, three days are devoted to talks that inspire design activism by presenting both theoretical specu­lation and concrete answers to urgent issues. Industrial designers, fashion designers, archi­tects, graphic designers, advertisers, research­ers and scientists take the stage, one after the other. The goal is to instil confidence and hope in over 2,000 visitors. The annual fair has been promoting innovative entrepreneurship for 24 years now. Founded in 1995 by Ravi Naidoo, the director of Interactive Africa, the company that runs the festival, Indaba aims to contrib­ute to a better future through presentations by charismatic and proactive talents. Of the 53 international speakers who discussed their projects, we’ve selected seven whose work is directly related to urgent contemporary prob­lems. Some are consolidated initiatives ready for more ambitious phases; others are still ex­perimental concepts.    

From Silicon Valley to Rwanda, the drone Zipline carries blood bags and medical sup­plies to remote places hard to reach by car. Conceived by Keller Rinaudo, Keenan Wyrobek and William Hetzler in 2011 and implement­ed in 2018, it is a miniature plane that can contain up to 1.5 kilos of material. The drone itself weighs 10 kilos and can travel for 120 kilometres round trip with one battery charge. The way it works is simple. When a doctor or medical worker has an emergency, they send a text message or WhatsApp to the Zipline. Soon enough, the drone parachutes the requested supplies into a small container. Waiting time varies from 10 minutes to 1 hour. At Design Indaba 2019, Wyrobek connected to one of the two distribution centres his company runs in Rwanda to show the audience in real time the launch of a Zipline. Once it is loaded, it is cata­pulted into the air. The drone resists wind and rain. To date, it has made over 11,000 deliver­ies, with an average 500 launches per day and many lives saved.    

Health is also the focus of the product designer Kacper Pietrzykowski. When he specialised in experiential design at the Massachusetts Insti­tute of Technology in Boston, his graduation project was a device for diabetics to measure blood sugar. His emphasis was on the psy­chological implications of this chronic illness, which requires so much attention from the patient he calls it “a second job”. The Polish designer calls his non-invasive device Ida, after the name of the person with whom he studied the disease. The machine considers the side effects and resistance that may arise from the daily routine of measuring blood-sugar levels. Ida measures haemoglobin through a sensor that identifies if the glucose levels are great­er than 80 milligrams per litre, thus avoiding many invasive tests and limiting the waste from the more common test strips.    

The emergency treated by Freyja Sewell is the “scourge of the future”: depression. “Depend­ence upon technology, lower attention spans, increased stress and anxiety are just a few of the problems caused by our consumption of technology,” explains the British designer. “Research shows that people who meditate improve their memory and have greater con­trol over their emotions, less anxiety and low levels of depression.” Her Mind Mirror, part of a broader study of privacy and mindfulness, monitors what happens in the brain when we meditate, with non-additive or competitive graphic and sound renderings, inspired by the notion of expanded consciousness.

Plastic. On the total and definitive reuse of this material-burden, the Dutch designer and mak­er Dave Hakkens built a DIY empire, providing makers all over the world with tools to recycle plastic quickly with machines that are easy to build. Born as an online video tutorial on how to select, assemble and recycle plastic, the pro­ject became a universal platform – precious­plastic.com – where users can join together with others who want to open their recycling business. Now that Precious Plastic can stand on its own, Hakkens is embarking on new pro­jects, an offline community we’ll hear more about after the summer.

Joining plastic and water, the Spanish de­signer Rodrigo García González analysed the Ooho! project – the legendary edible water bot­tles. Conceived by Skipping Rock Lab based in London (González is co-Ceo), aims to elim­inate the plastic packaging from water sold at retail. In order to do this, the lab was inspired by the molecular cuisine of Ferran Adrià, who “spherified” liquids, trapping them in gelati­nous membranes through chemical reactions between natural agents. The result are small edible sacs full of liquid. Skipping Rock Lab’s research lies in making this formula as effec­tive as possible and accessible to everyone. 

Water is the key element in the project by the young designer Mirjam De Bruijn, who trained at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. De Brui­jn reconsiders home detergents and cosmetics sold in supermarkets whose water content is 80 per cent. The majority of unsold products are an enormous waste. With Twenty, De Brui­jn imagines a packaging system that contains only the “useful” 20 per cent, inside a biode­gradable capsule. Each person is free to re­combine it with water from their own homes.    

Fashion industry waste is among the most harmful to the environment. Japanese design­er Kye Shimizu invented Algorithmic Couture, born to overturn the “design-production-sale” formula into “design-sale-production” one. Al­gorithmic fashion detects by 3D scanning the shape of the buyer’s body, designs totally cus­tomisable clothes through parametric draw­ings, and divides them into modular elements made up of bands and triangles to obtain an­ti-waste geometric forms. The production con­sists in laser-cutting these forms and assem­bling them easily to create garments.