Hasta La Ideas

Scarcity is a tough teacher. There’s nothing romantic about people being so desperate for building materials, they’ll strip a newly built school down to its foundations. But constraints can lead to clever creative breakthroughs—a principle that every designer knows. Some very smart solutions in sustainability, tech and product design are emerging from the African continent. Design Indaba has been championing these examples of African innovation since it was founded in 1995 but is now using the full power of its online publication and presence to cover the continent like never before.

At DesignIndaba.com, you’ll find a treasure trove of stories about African makers and creators with a singular, make-do approach to materiality, transforming what’s at hand into unexpected objects and designs that delight. Found objects are repurposed in ingenious ways while mass-produced materials are reimagined in novel applications—always reflecting traces of a previous incarnation.

Here are three stories from Design Indaba that reflect this capacity to think on your feet, adapt and improvise in order to create ingenious design applications. Design Indaba’s online publication publishes content about design and innovation from Africa and beyond every day.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Dutch designers Melle Smets and Joost van Onna followed the trail of Europe’s discarded vehicles to capitalism’s periphery—the industrial hub of Suame Magazine in Ghana. In this immense open-air factory, over 200,000 craftsmen recycle discarded car parts into new vehicles. Smets and Van Onna collaborated with local craftsmen to create a new, archetypical African car: the SMATI Turtle 1. The car took its name from its characteristics—slow but steady speed, its basic and strong mechanics and its protective bodywork.

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