FEATURE: LOCAL DESIGN I CONSCIOUS DESIGN
WORDS:
he fairytale is over. Gone are the days when the princess only flew business class and the handsome prince waited in his V8 to whisk her off to that fabled South Beach hotel, the one that was envisioned by Marcel Wanders. The careless joy they had skipping from Maison et Objet to Art Basel, maxing out credit cards, buying a perfect life. The environment has been begging for mercy for generations but we are only responding now that our designer handbags are unaffordable. We should have seen the signs when the most coveted piece of art was a diamond-encrusted scull. Death through decadence. The designer life has finally cost the world too much. Yet the woes of the times need not foretell a barren future for design. They should herald a renaissance. We are the architects of our own demise but this could be our saving grace; as soon as we create an imbalance, we become acutely aware of it and work at rebalancing it. In this balancing act, we become truly creative. Value in design now lies in how our consciousness is articulated. Words like ‘sustainability’, ‘recycling’ and ‘green’ have quickly become ubiquitously misused consumer catchphrases to hide behind. Essentially, a move away from consumerism is our greatest challenge. The awareness is there, but it’s a reality we’re trying to avoid. Ultimately, we have to face the question of what this shift in awareness implies for design. The answer, I believe, lies in our own backyard. Consciousness of our environment and what it can teach has become the most valuable asset for designers today. We need to return to our own roots, reuse the resources we find there and, only as a last resort, recycle what we can find no other use for.
annelie rode
In developing countries, design is born from necessity. Economy of means is the framework and local craftsmanship is the art. Add heritage to this paradigm and you have the tools for ingenious design. Being blessed enough that our backyard is Africa can only mean inspiration and great design. Having African roots with such diverse cultural, political and artistic influences bestows us with a unique design-oriented identity to tap into. It gives us a consciousness embedded in heritage, aware of space and functionality, cautious with resources, and blessed with exceptional craftsmanship. In the following pages we have a selection of a new guard of designers whose roots all exist here in South Africa. Here, where they have leant that nothing should be taken for granted, that everything has the potential for positive change. Here, where we’re aware that design can be decidedly conscious and nonetheless, deliciously decadent. We’ve made our focus ‘conscious design’, and by this we mean not just eco-conscious, but conscious in a more encompassing sense. LIV Design, who we feature a little later on, put it well: “To us, this means design that acknowledges human beings through job creation; design that is sensitive towards culture and its local community; design that makes economic sense and that considers the impact it has on our planet by the reusing and rethinking of waste and materials.” Design is a crucial factor in the lives of human beings and needs to be viewed with status in its own right, not subordinated to the arts or sciences. Design has shaped our world and can be used to reshape it. This realisation is the first step in what conscious design is all about. The ones that follow can take a wealth of possible forms, because of the limitless creativity of the individual who consciously designs them. The following showcase presents just a sample of such individuals. Individuals who, as designers, are conscious in all the most important ways. Be inspired. one small seed
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