I am honoured to have been invited as the South African keynote for the first LeNS World Distributed Conference: Designing Sustainability for All. It takes place from the 3-5th April 2019 simultaneously in Mexico City, Mexico; Curitiba, Brazil; Cape Town, South Africa; Milan, Italy; Bangalore, India and Beijing, China. The conference is organised as part of the LeNSin, the International Learning Network of networks on Sustainability project (2015-2019), which is supported by EU Erasmus+ programme.

From the conference’s website, the organisers explain that “Designing sustainability for All envisions a cosmopolitan approach by collecting and sharing contributions from and for all of the contexts: low, middle and high-income ones, from north, south, west and east of the world. Designing sustainability for All is a call for contributions and actions to the whole world design community, i.e. design researchers, design educators and design practitioners.”

My keynote will focus on exploring my own narrative history of attempting to design sustainability for all over the last 21 years. This is embedded in my own experiences working as a design researcher in South Africa, although I do also reflect on important personal experiences in Mozambique and India. Without giving too much away, I will explore themes of immersion & connection, lay designers & local experts, small & incremental, systems & networks, and finally concepts & reality. I will post a link to the full recorded presentation once presented at the conference next week!