Hasta La Ideas

The annual Design Indaba conference brings the most innovative design practitioners from around the world to Cape Town, South Africa. This year was the magazine’s 15th conference and along with three days of speaker presentations, there is also an accompanying Expo showcasing South Africa’s brightest design talent, now through March 4th.

All designers recognize collaboration as fundamental to the process of design. Whether it’s collaborating across disciplines or within a single studio, the profession is strengthened by this unique tenet. On Design Indaba’s opening day, the design philosophies of two speakers presented a challenge beyond their particular fields of food and landscape. What possibilities open when designers consider time and place as collaborators in their work? René Redzepi, an owner and chef of Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant, leverages both to design a daily meditation on the plate. Dan Pearson, London-based landscape architect, delights in the unexpected dimensions of collaborating with time and place.

A Single Moment on the Plate

The best chef in the world is René Redzepi. The owner and creative force behind Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant, Redzepi is credited with creating “New Nordic” cuisine emphasizing seasonal, local and foraged ingredients.

Courtesy of Phaidon

Known for his unexpected ingredients and flavor profiles, the chef opened his presentation with an element of surprise, a visual gag. Porters wheeled out a dead duck strung up on a rolling rack—fully feathered with a visible blood stain still red from the kill. The duck was a great metaphor for Redzepi’s approach to food and designing elements on the plate: fresh, local unexpected and memorable.

When the restaurant opened in 2004, Redzepi faced an unconvinced audience. “No one believed that a restaurant serving Nordic cuisine could project into the future,” Redzepi recalls. Although it took a moment to find its culinary footing, once it did, Noma turned the expectations for fine dining in Copenhagen on its head. The restaurant itself is minimal, its interiors dealing in the same pared down elegance as the food itself. Without the white tablecloth treatment, the food is clearly the star.

(more…)