2011 – 2021 | iZindaba Zokudla (Conversations About Food)

“... the role of the designer is to create dialogue, that’s the only thing that works. The more people, the more we need to talk, to hear each other, to learn to argue with each other. The role of a project is sometimes to simply create a dialogue. It’s not the result, it’s what type of dialogue I managed to create around the project. I think the value of dialogue is rising compared to the value of production. We went from the value of design [being] the number of parts you will be selling at the end... tomorrow the value of design will be how important the dialogue you managed to create, between how many stakeholders, with which social and cultural differences, on what scale.” Antoine Fenoglio, Designer and founder of Sismo, Paris. iZindaba Zokudla (Conversations about Food) – Innovation in the Soweto Food System is a multi-stakeholder engagement project ... Read More

2014 – 2021 | Design Society Development DESIS Lab

I was a co-founder of the Design Society Development (DSD) Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab in 2014 and was intimately involved in its development as a design research community of practice at the UJ Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture until I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2021. Overview: The DESIS Network is a constellation of autonomous but interconnected DESIS Labs - as of 2021, there are 59 labs worldwide, with only 3 based in Africa. The DESIS Network is managed under the association of the Politecnico di Milano, Italy; The New School, USA; University of Arts London, UK; Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Jiangnan University, China; and Tonji University, China. DESIS Labs are independent, but connected, groups of academics, researchers and students who orient their design and research activities towards social innovation and sustainability. They operate at the local scale with local partners ... Read More