Designing for Dialogue - Cape Town's blueprint design challenge
Can design change the world?
In South Africa, design entrenched apartheid. Our town planning was carried out on a design brief of isolation. That was the apartheid blueprint.
Cape Town is splendid in its design dysfunction. Freeways and train lines divide neighbourhoods and isolate us into language groups; common recreation areas there are none; in a city surrounded by the sea, some of us have never even seen it! That is how isolated and immobile we are.
To enable the city, to undesign the trenches - metaphorical and physical - that divide it, we need design for dialogue.
Design for dialogue - design that transforms physical spaces in a way that brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. In coming together we are able to discover how similar - rather than how different - we are, and we discover shared resources. In these discoveries we are better equipped to act on opportunity. And if the design is right, there is the physical mobility available to get us where we need to be to benefit from these opportunities, and the intellectual mobility to share our ideas. Good design creates dialogue and opportunity. Bad design creates silence and isolation.
(Here's some thoughts on the topic http://www.designfordialogue.org/, by the guys who coined the term).
On the 31st of March 2011, the Cape Town Design Network (@ctdnetwork), a new entity, hosted its debut event, bringing together architects, designers, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and all sorts of interested people, from across the city. It's the same mould as the original Creative Cluster sessions presented by Creative Cape Town.
One of the CTDN's core activites is `[the promotion] of the use of design to solve economic, social, geographic, infrastructural and political legacy problems'.
And so to the post-apartheid design brief. For it's first session, CTDN came out with a strong push in the direction of design as a tool for social change and economic development.
CTDN invited four speakers to the first event that would bring out different facets of this brief:
The trolley-homes of the neighbourhoods homeless were as loud as passing trains intermittently just outside the window (what will happen to them as the zone develops and inevitably pushes them out, is there a solution with the design of the Innovation District?).
Live tweets of the event were projected onto a tweet wall on one side of the bar, that was very cool (could be an interesting educational tool?). Big ups to super-tweeter @futurecapetown, who types faster on an iphone than Steve Jobs, and who captured superbly the salient points of the evening.
And what a lovely audience between these walls. Attentive and open and interested. That's a good start for creating change.
As an invited speaker what pleased me the most was that I was invited. What I mean is that I'm not a designer, I don't move in the design world, although a lot of my work is the design of experiences. It's great that the CTDN doesn't want to talk only to its own community, but to engage many communities. That's the only way this will work. The other day I was talking to a creative head who was pitching his way-out creative project, a project about creativity and how to be creative, to creatives. And I was saying but brother, you need to pitch this to people outside of the creative industries, it's useless to sell cakes to cake makers, sell them to cake eaters.
So I`m imagining a kind of monthly circuit of these events, hosted by many different strands of Cape Town business; TED-ish oriented presentations with dialogue around them, and they all invite speakers from different sectors in order to inform their own. That in itself would be a form of dialogue for design.
The thing is that Cape Town wants to talk. But the interventions are not always there that make it possible. Events like these put some fire in the hole.
In South Africa, design entrenched apartheid. Our town planning was carried out on a design brief of isolation. That was the apartheid blueprint.
Cape Town is splendid in its design dysfunction. Freeways and train lines divide neighbourhoods and isolate us into language groups; common recreation areas there are none; in a city surrounded by the sea, some of us have never even seen it! That is how isolated and immobile we are.
To enable the city, to undesign the trenches - metaphorical and physical - that divide it, we need design for dialogue.
Design for dialogue - design that transforms physical spaces in a way that brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. In coming together we are able to discover how similar - rather than how different - we are, and we discover shared resources. In these discoveries we are better equipped to act on opportunity. And if the design is right, there is the physical mobility available to get us where we need to be to benefit from these opportunities, and the intellectual mobility to share our ideas. Good design creates dialogue and opportunity. Bad design creates silence and isolation.
(Here's some thoughts on the topic http://www.designfordialogue.org/, by the guys who coined the term).
On the 31st of March 2011, the Cape Town Design Network (@ctdnetwork), a new entity, hosted its debut event, bringing together architects, designers, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and all sorts of interested people, from across the city. It's the same mould as the original Creative Cluster sessions presented by Creative Cape Town.
One of the CTDN's core activites is `[the promotion] of the use of design to solve economic, social, geographic, infrastructural and political legacy problems'.
And so to the post-apartheid design brief. For it's first session, CTDN came out with a strong push in the direction of design as a tool for social change and economic development.
CTDN invited four speakers to the first event that would bring out different facets of this brief:
- Yehuda Raff introduced us to the Fringe Innovation District project he's co-ordinating on behalf of Creative Cape Town. Follow the link to explore it.
- Yj Tsai (@tsaidesign), of Tsai Design Studios, showed us some of his container projects, and an idea to paint a South African flag on top of hundreds of shack roofs as a welcome to visitors. He's got some intriguing design solutions
- Khalied Jacobs of Jakupa architects and urban designers introduced us to a group of poor women who contracted Jakupa to design their own RDP development.
- And me myself (@iainiain), from Coffeebeans Routes, I was invited to speak on The Centres of Cape Town, a presentation based on a previous blog and the notion of an ideal city mimicking neural networks.
The trolley-homes of the neighbourhoods homeless were as loud as passing trains intermittently just outside the window (what will happen to them as the zone develops and inevitably pushes them out, is there a solution with the design of the Innovation District?).
Live tweets of the event were projected onto a tweet wall on one side of the bar, that was very cool (could be an interesting educational tool?). Big ups to super-tweeter @futurecapetown, who types faster on an iphone than Steve Jobs, and who captured superbly the salient points of the evening.
And what a lovely audience between these walls. Attentive and open and interested. That's a good start for creating change.
As an invited speaker what pleased me the most was that I was invited. What I mean is that I'm not a designer, I don't move in the design world, although a lot of my work is the design of experiences. It's great that the CTDN doesn't want to talk only to its own community, but to engage many communities. That's the only way this will work. The other day I was talking to a creative head who was pitching his way-out creative project, a project about creativity and how to be creative, to creatives. And I was saying but brother, you need to pitch this to people outside of the creative industries, it's useless to sell cakes to cake makers, sell them to cake eaters.
So I`m imagining a kind of monthly circuit of these events, hosted by many different strands of Cape Town business; TED-ish oriented presentations with dialogue around them, and they all invite speakers from different sectors in order to inform their own. That in itself would be a form of dialogue for design.
The thing is that Cape Town wants to talk. But the interventions are not always there that make it possible. Events like these put some fire in the hole.
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