Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government’s websites into a single site.

“There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one,” says Terrett. “The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn’t have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it’s there. They don’t have to know which department has what information.”

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. “People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he says. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need.”

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK’s road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: “There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work,” he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network. “The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we’re doing.”

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. “Something we’re trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want,” Terrett says. “You shouldn’t come to the website and go: ‘wow, look at the graphic design’. We haven’t yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they’re still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that.”

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. “Google Glass and other things that we don’t know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff,” he says. “But there’s a long way to go and I think it’s a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge.”

The Gov.uk website is shortlisted for this year’s Designs of the Year award, alongside high-profile projects such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Google Creative Lab creative director Alexander Chen explains how he created a digital string you can pluck like a viola and discusses Google Glass and the future of user interface design in this movie we filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month. 

Chen presented a number of his personal projects at Design Indaba, which involve novel ways of making music on a computer. “I grew up playing the viola and I’ve always written and recorded my own music,” he explains. “I was learning that alongside computer programming and visual design [so] I always wanted to combine the things together.”

For a project called Mta.me, Chen created a virtual stringed instrument based on the New York subway system (above). “I’d just moved to New York and I started to think ‘what if the lines on the subway map could be a musical instrument?'” he says.

In Chen’s map, the different subway routes become strings, which vibrate at different frequencies based on their length. Chen then animated the map so that the strings are plucked by other subway lines that intersect them. “I took it one step further,” he says. “I looked up the subway schedule and using computer code had the subway performing itself.”

Chen then goes on to talk about his work at Google Creative Lab, where he helped to produce the original concept video for Google Glass, as well as the final movie demonstrating the new user interface, which Google released in February.

He believes that wearable technology like Google Glass demonstrates how digital technology in future will be more integrated into our lives. “Technology continues to disappear more and more,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to make any strong predictions, but I hope that technology disappears more and more from my life and you forget that you’re using it all the time instead of feeling like you’re burdened [by it].

“I hope it becomes more like the water running in our house and the electricity running through our buildings: we use it when we need it and then we forget about it for the rest of the day and just enjoy being people.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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continue to disappear” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in latest video from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura of Japanese creative agency PARTY talks about the pop-up 3D photo booth he ran in Tokyo last year. 

The Omote 3D Shashinkan project, which we featured on Dezeen last year, gave customers the opportunity to buy a 3D-printed model of themselves or their family. “We wanted to find a new way to innovate the form of the family portrait and bring it to the next century,” Kawamura explains. “What happens is, when you come, we take a full 3D scan [of your body] using our portable scanners. People could actually bring back home their miniature figurines, instead of a 2D portrait that you normally get.”

PARTY used a colour 3D printer to produce the detailed models, which ranged from 10cm to 20cm high, but Kawamura believes there is still a lot of room for the technology to improve. “3D printing for me is a very exciting medium to play around with, but I think it’s still in a very early phase of development,” he says. “After doing this project we’ve learnt a lot of technical difficulties and a lot of things that could be done better in terms of technologies and also the materials that we use.”

But Kawamura is optimistic about the future possibilities of 3D printing. “Everything, I think, will get better in the next year or two; there’ll be significant improvements,” he says. “Just the idea that anyone could manufacture their own product is very, very interesting.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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portrait into the next century” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde spoke to us at Design Indaba in Cape Town about his designs for glow-in-the-dark roads and clothing that will literally expose dishonest bankers. 

Roosegaarde, who runs Studio Roosegaarde, explains that his Smart Highways project is an attempt to move the focus of road safety away from car design and onto the roads themselves. “Why is design always focussed on cars, on how they look and how they behave, and not on the roads, which determine our landscape much, much more?” he asks.

The studio has developed concepts including a priority lane for electric cars (above), which incorporates induction coils under the tarmac to recharge them as they drive, as well as road markings that glow in the dark or react to temperature change (below).

“We’ve been working with paints that can change colour based on temperature and literally adding this to the road,” Roosegaarde explains. “So the moment the road starts to freeze these huge snowflakes start to appear and when the sun comes up they disappear again.”

Roosegaarde was one of three speakers to receive a standing ovation at the Design Indaba conference, which took place in Cape Town at the start of this month.

He believes it is important that designers look at how new technology can be applied to existing infrastructure in this way. “I think that’s the role of the designer, to create missing links between this old failing world and the new world,” he says.

Roosegaarde also explains the concept behind his Intimacy project, a series of dresses that become transparent when the wearer’s heart rate increases. “Technology is our second skin, our second language, in the way we communicate our experience, our information. But why are we looking at these bloody iPhone screens the whole day? Why can’t it be more tactile, more intuitive?”

Finally, he reveals that his studio is currently taking the project in an interesting new direction. “Right now we’re also working on a suit for men, especially for the banking world, which becomes transparent when they lie,” he says. “Let’s see what reality looks like then.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “We’re working on a suit that becomes
transparent when you lie” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: earlier this month we kicked off our Dezeen and MINI World Tour at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town. Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs rounds up the highlights of the week.

Above: Dan Roosegaarde of Studio Roosegaarde was one of three Design Indaba speakers to receive a standing ovation

Cape Town is the most southerly destination on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour and the only one in Africa. Located at the southern tip of the continent, on the same latitude as Sydney and with empty ocean to the west, south and east, it is geographically remote but culturally better connected, being a relatively easy flight south from Europe that is without the disorientating time difference of most long-haul routes.

In terms of design, Cape Town has a small but growing scene – mostly clustered in the upcoming Woodstock district, which we featured in an earlier movie. This area is home to galleries and stores including Woodstock Foundry, whose Heavy Metal exhibition (below) was one of the most talked-about showcases of local work during our stay.

The city is set to raise its international profile next year when it serves as World Design Capital but, for now, Cape Town is umbilically linked to the rest of the world primarily through Design Indaba, which was the reason for our trip to the city.

An “indaba” is a gathering of Zulu or Xhosa tribal leaders and the word is used in South Africa to describe a meeting of minds. Design Indaba started out as a bi-annual design conference in 1995 but has grown to encompass an Expo showcasing South African creativity (and which this year featured the Li Edelkoort-curated exhibition Totemism: Memphis meets Africa, above) plus a music circuit (below) and film festival for after-hours entertainment.

All these activities take place concurrently each year at the end of the Cape Town summer. But for the international crowd, the Design Indaba conference (below) is the main event, attracting an unrivalled line-up of star speakers from around the globe and a sell-out audience of 1500 people per day, around 80% of whom are from South Africa.

The conference’s pulling power is largely due to the charisma and persuasiveness of Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo (below) who has long been on a one-man mission to diversify the South African economy away from commodities and tourism and towards the creative industries, as he explained as he gave us a tour of Cape Town on our first day in the city.

Naidoo has since managed to build his brand into a micro-economy of its own: last year the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business calculated that Design Indaba had added over $100 million to South African GDP over the four previous years, via sales of local products at the Design Indaba Expo and other visitor spending.

It can feel perverse to spend three days in the refrigerated bowels of the Cape Town International Convention Centre (above) rather than on the beach, in the wine lands or exploring upcoming city districts like Woodstock or Bree Street.

And without a theme, the conference is a somewhat random tasting menu of global creativity with web designers (such as Ben Terrett, above, head of design at the UK’s Government Digital Service) following synthetic biologists and architects (like Asif Khan, below) giving way to advertising creatives. But the standard is high and the audience discerning, rewarding favoured speakers with spontaneous applause (the Design Indaba gold standard is a standing ovation) but punishing the unprepared or the cocksure with a deathly silence, a Twitter barracking or even a stampede for the exits.

Nine years ago I watched Ron Arad amble on stage, open his laptop and assume the crowd would love whatever he happened to find on his desktop. They didn’t and he spent the rest of the week apologising for his lack of preparedeness. The next speaker, a young Thomas Heatherwick, had spent the entire week rehearsing in his hotel room and he blew his former mentor off the stage. In 2010 the audience won its biggest scalp, laughing Martha Stewart off stage for delivering a sales pitch instead of a heartfelt design homily.

Design Indaba 2013 highlights

Nobody bombed quite so badly this year and there were three standing ovations (Naidoo says this is a record) as well as a notebook-full of tweetable quotes, which seems to be the measure of a good conference these days. “Creativity is a small, defiant act of misbehaving,” claimed graphic designer Paula Scher while Alexander Chen (above) of Google Creative Lab declared that “reducing is not a designer need but a human need” and that his goal with projects such as his work on Google Glass is to provide “less and less user interface”.

John Maeda (above) touched on a paradox when he said that “design as a discipline is not designed well to be understood” while Brazilian chef Alex Atala (below), in between explaining why his rainforest-inspired dishes often contained burned ingredients and showing some polished culinary videos (Naidoo tells me that some of the best speakers with the best visuals in recent years have been chefs), proclaimed that “crunchiness isn’t a flavour, it’s a noise. Noise is important for a chef.”

Atala also said that his children’s plimsolls smelt the same as fine cheese, which chimed with a point made by Daisy Ginsberg (below), a designer working in the area of synthetic biology (and who confessed she received professional coaching to help her with her talk). “Could you make cheese out of human bacteria? The answer is yes,” she said, proving the point with images of cheese made of armpit, toe, hand and nose bacteria.

Advertising guru John Hegarty (below) closed the conference with an assured talk based on the notion that “cynicism is the death of creativity.” “If you destroy something you have to propose something else to take its place,” he said, summing up why he felt punk was an anti-creative movement as it proposed no alternative to the system it set out to destroy.

Hegarty also apparently spent days in his hotel room preparing his talk and counter-intuitively it seems that older, more experienced speakers work harder on their presentations than upcoming talents, who are more inclined to wing it. The explanation might be that they have less to lose.

Standing ovations

The first standing ovation went to Johannesburg artist Nicholas Hlobo, the only South African on the big stage this year and the winner of the unofficial “best entrance” award. Hlobo descended slowly from the rafters inside a fabric cocoon to a live musical cacophony while a subtitled projection explained his work and its relationship to his Xhosa culture and in particular its rites of passage. It was a powerful, well-rehearsed and uncompromisingly African statement that thoroughly seduced a crowd that likes to see speakers make an effort.

The second ovation went to Dutch “artist and innovator” Daan Roosegaarde (pictured top) of Studio Roosegaarde, whose stage presence and design-can-change-the-world rhetoric was manna to the Indaba crowd. Roosegaarde’s roster of projects included clothes that become transparent when you become aroused (above) and a Smart Highway featuring solar-powered road markings, wind-powered lighting, surfaces that display warning patterns when the temperature drops below freezing (below) and charging lanes for electronic vehicles.

This was coupled with the observation that while design attention is lavished on cars, the roads they drive on are given virtually no thought at all, even though the highways network is the biggest manmade structure on the planet.

Architect David Adjaye (above) was the recipient of the third ovation and also the only speaker allowed to overrun the strict 40-minute time limit, since his discourse first on the geography and architecture of Africa (above) – drawing on 11 years of research that involved visiting every country on the continent and which culminated in his 2011 book Adjaye Africa Architecture (below) – and then a selection of his built projects, had the audience rapt.

Pulling him off would have sparked a riot, particularly as he saved his most resonant project until last: the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture (below) will occupy the last remaining plot on Washington’s showpiece Constitution Avenue and is perhaps the most significant cultural memorial to black history ever built anywhere.

Adjaye spoke at Design Indaba in 2006 but since then his ability to hold an audience has increased in line with his body of work and, as one of the world’s leading black creatives, this felt like a triumphant homecoming for a London-based architect born in Dar es Salaam of Ghanaian parents.

It’s hard to summarise any conference in words but even harder to distill the essence of Design Indaba, since its greatest value lies not in the conference hall but in the collective experience enjoyed by speakers and journalists from the four corners of the planet. The Design Indaba “speaker bubble” is one of the world’s best and most hospitable networking opportunities for the design world and takes place against a backdrop of cocktail soirees, beach picnics, wine-estate lunches and gigs. These included an exclusive performance by legendary jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela in a tiny jazz bar (above) with Design Indaba’s own fleet of branded MINIs on hand to ferry speakers and the media between engagements (below).

This sense of community, and the conference’s ability to make or break the reputation of speakers, means it’s hard to argue with Naidoo’s claim that it is design’s answer to Davos and the biggest and best design conference of the world. And for speakers fortunate enough to get invited, the best advice is to prepare your talk as thoroughly as you can before you arrive, so you don’t miss anything when you get there.

Above: Design Indaba 2013 speakers with Hugh Masekela (centre) and Ravi Naidoo (far left). Design Indaba photos are by Jonx Pillemer

Read more about Daan Roosegaarde’s concepts to make highways safer here.

See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Cape Town »

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