I am honoured to have been invited to present a Studia Generalia lecture and a workshop for the Finnish Design Academy mid-November 2020! The Finnish Design Academy is a collaborative network of Finnish university-level design schools, which aims to develop design education to better answer the changing needs of working life. It is a collaboration between nine Finnish universities and I was invited by Sami Kauppinen from the Laurea University of Applied Sciences Masters Degree Programme in Service Innovation and Design to present the lecture and workshop through my prior engagement in an Erasmus+ project linked to the University of Johannesburg. The details of the lecture are as follows: Date: 17 November 2020 Time: 15.00 – 16.00 (EEST) Title: Designing with the Underserved: An Exploration of the Complexities of Design in South Africa from the perspective of the SDGs With reference to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this Studia Generalia … Read More
Innovators for the Future
“As the world lives through a crisis unprecedented in recent history, we launch our first Global Open Call to Action for Innovators for the Future. We solicit your help to turn this severe global challenge into an opportunity – an opportunity to address the urgencies of the moment and the problems of our futures. This Call to Action is organized by the Futures Project as a contribution to the UN75 Global Conversation Initiative.” https://call-for-innovators.futures-project.org/ The Futures Project seeks to identify projects that help communities, building on their motto: “innovation is the future delivered“. You can nominate an initiative you know of, or self-nominate a project you’re affiliated with. They are especially interested in learning about work that may have gone unrecognized on the global stage, whether these initiatives are very recent or more established, provided they are relevant for today and the future. The qualities that they are looking for … Read More
Collaborative People in Challenging Places
These are some thoughts that arose from a request by Prof Ezio Manzini for me to provide some prior input into the DESIS DxCC Seminar on Collaborative People in Challenging Places which took place at the Cumulus Bogotà Conference on the 19 September 2019: “Much of my research engages with individuals who were previously legally marginalised under apartheid, and now even with a majority elected democratic government in place for the last 21 years, continue to find themselves on South Africa’s margins, both physically and politically. Cities in Africa, and South Africa in particular, hold the hope for a better future and hence have been the locations for extensive urban migration. The Gauteng-City Region, where I am based, is home to a quarter of South Africa’s total population. It generates a third of the country’s GDP, on just 2% of South Africa’s total land area. However, such economic stats only speak to those who are formally employed, which in … Read More
Educating Citizen Designers In South Africa
Another book in which I have a co-authored a chapter, this time with Ivan Leroy Brown, has just been released! The chapter, no. 5 in the book, explores “A Potential Difference Model for Educating Critical Citizen Designers: The Case Study of the Beegin Appropriate Technology Beekeeping System” (pp. 89-108) and features Ivan’s incredible Beegin beehive. “Educating Citizen Designers in South Africa is the first book of its kind to appear in postapartheid South Africa and it is therefore both overdue and extremely welcome. The book aims at sharing critical citizenship design teaching and learning pedagogies by including contributions from a range of design educators, and one student, who work in different design disciplines, such as architecture, graphic and product design. Critical citizenship education is explicated in relation to a range of theories and new and existing models. Numerous contemporary case studies and examples of design projects from a range of South African Higher … Read More
Global Summit on Social Innovation
From the 14-15 of March 2017 I will be representing the Design Society Development DESIS Lab at the Global Summit on Social Innovation in Bogotá, Colombia hosted by the The Rockefeller Foundation and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter–American Development Bank Group. The Summit is an exciting opportunity to bring together leading actors from across the social innovation spectrum – from labs to social enterprise accelerators – to learn, share, inspire, and collaborate. The Design Society Development DESIS Lab was one of a select group of key actors, stakeholders, and practitioners in the social innovation space that were identified as being able to help drive truly systemic social change. Today’s global challenges are more complex and rapidly changing—traditional approaches to problem solving can’t keep pace. But at the same time, social change agents have more tools at our disposal, and more diversity of ideas to draw from through processes like crowdsourcing or … Read More