Goemarati - a music strategy as design

Goemarati - you are welcome.
Designing an inclusive intervention

I'm not a designer. I trained as an actor and film-maker, and became an entrepreneur.

But I've learned that design is at the heart of everything that we do - if not always entirely by design. So that makes us all designers, in an unconscious way.

In people's homes, decisions have been made about where to put this painting in relation to that picture, where the chair stands in relation to the sofa, the pot plant in relation to the graduation certificate. These are all design decisions, but very few people doing this would consider themselves as designers. 

Enjoying the foodcourt at the
Manenberg Goemarati

I watch my son, he's 14 months old, plot his routes. Even at this early stage of life, design is central. When we walk out of the apartment, he has a specific routine. He always turns right out of the door. He touches the geyser outlet pipe on the wall. He touches the neighbour's gate. He stops at Leon's bamboo wind chimes, flicks it, and when it sounds, he laughs and turns to me. Then he grabs a stone from the pot plant and hands it to me. Every time, exactly the same. He has designed a set of rituals. And the design process is unconscious.

So I have realised that everyone is a designer. Some design unconsciously by virtue of being alive, and others design by design, as practicioners.

Some star power, Akin Omotoso
loved the Goemarati

In 2007 I produced a project called Goemarati. The roleplayers were Coffeebeans Routes, working with Creative Cape Town, the Cape Town Partnership and Lunch Communications, with funding from the Department of Economic Development and Tourism. We designed an intervention for the music industry of the Western Cape built around the distinctly Cape Town music called goema.

And I use the term design very deliberately, as we were consciously designing a solution to a problem. It just so happened that the design solution wasn't a manufacturable outcome.

Goemarati had four primary components:

1. thirteen live performances, one each month on Church Square in the central city, one in a suburb of the Cape Flats.
2. an online sales portal for Cape Town music and creative products
3. a street level mobile shop, an extension of the online shop, in the form of a loud tricycle
4. a monthly `zine', an edgy monochrome fold out magazine designed by Lunch, profiling the featured artists for the month, the Cape Town product available for sale, and celebrating a different facet of Cape Town’s history, especially stories from the era of slavery.

Take a look here at the full online report: http://www.coffeebeans.co.za/goemarati/report/start.html

So we designed an umbrella marketing campaign for music and other creative products from Cape Town, using monthly live shows as the leverage, alongside local and global sales platforms and a dedicated monthly publication. 

Kalkfontein Goemarati at the taxi rank, great turnout

And one of the core elements underpinning the musical strategy, was a spatial strategy: connecting the central city as a site of heritage with sites in the Cape Flats, and by doing so attempting to create the basis for stronger linkages and movements of people and ideas. We wanted to link across apartheid boundaries and beyond cultural disconnects. Had the project lived beyond its pilot phase, this would have been a significant long term device for shifting some of the parameters of apartheid town planning and mental ghettos.

The tagline for the initiative was `You are Welcome’, and the entire project was designed to be inclusive. The criteria to be featured for performance was that you had to have product, in any form, whether it be an MP3 song or poem. The open mic session surprised us, it was oversubscribed for all performances except one, and turned out to the be most significant performance element of the project. It made us realise that if Cape Town doesn’t create spaces for its young people to be heard in public forums, we are incubating a time bomb. 

The project’s success was also its failure. You can’t measure on paper the value of the open mic sessions, the hunger to get on stage and be heard. You can’t make tangible in a report the effect on children of seeing a local star perform in the rain at the taxi rank close to their home. Except for the stats of the project - audience numbers, financial benefit to the industry, units of product sold etc - you can’t adequately measure the extent of the impact of such a project in its first few years.

We designed a powerful initiative, but one that couldn’t leave permanence after its pilot 8 months, one that wasn’t designed to leave permanence. Politicians in their 5 year stints need to tick boxes, show legacy, and a culture project is too difficult to measure and therefore that money is diverted to more tangible, measurable activities. That was the thinking behind not continuing after the pilot. That, and the instability of the Western Cape's politics at that time, shifting so constantly between political masters. This is one of the crises of South African government: it does not, in any of its designations, know what to do with culture. Identity, how we perceive ourselves, is a crucial economic cog.

And so there lies one of Goemarati's crucial design flaws: we couldn’t measure cultural impact. And its something that needs to be worked on. Any suggestions would be welcome!