Graduates at Conference 2013

We look forward to welcoming top graduates from design schools across the globe as Pecha Kucha speakers to Design Indaba Conference 2013.

A favourite spot on the Design Indaba Conference speaker programme, the 2013 graduation presentation slot will once again inspire and delight as we hear from top design graduates from around the globe.

In line with Design Indaba’s commitment to promoting and investing in the future of design, creativity and innovation, these select graduates and their work all serve as a manifestation of how creative powers can be harnessed to ensure a better tomorrow.

Now in its fifth year at Design Indaba Conference, we’ve noticed that the graduates are unencumbered by a brief or clients – and tend to do edgier, higher risk provocative work! So it’s a gorgeous blue-sky laboratory of the possible.  

In 2013 it is our great pleasure to welcome the following graduates on stage at Design Indaba Conference (in no particular order):

Wael Morcos

Currently working towards his MFA in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, Morcos has a keen interest in Arabic typography and its modern development.

Having been born in Lebanon, a country where sectarianism has shaped its social and political scene, Morcos is intrigued by how the idea of belonging and self-representation affects communication processes between people.

Joschua Brunn

In 2012 Joschua Brunn graduated with an MA in Product Design from ECAL/University of Art and Design in Lausanne. 

Brunn’s graduation project on running shoes manifested his interest in creating innovative, human-centred products resulting from observing needs, technology and materials.

Right after graduating he started working for Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec in Paris where he assists on furniture design projects. 

Leanie van der Vyver

A frustration with the insatiable expectations of modern life is what motivates Leanie van der Vyver to create. 

For her graduation work at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Cape Town-born designer created the Scary Beautiful shoes, a project that evokes a conversation about notions of fashion, perfection and beauty, and asks at what point do we start creating monsters.

Scary Beautiful has enjoyed worldwide attention, with the video having had some four million views on Vimeo, as well as coverage in international publications and on TV talk shows around the globe. 

Pieter-Jan Pieters

Innovation, design, technology, engineering and fun is what drives Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Pieter-Jan Pieters’ work. His graduation work, Sound on Intuition, explored how people’s movement can be translated into sounds.

Pieters recently founded OWOW (theomnipresentworldofwizkids), a studio where he can be as “free and untamed as a child in a grownup and mature world”.

Marguerite Humeau

As the designer, heroine and narrator of epic journeys, reality for Humeau is “becoming increasingly opaque and could be seen as a permanent fiction”.

A Royal College of Art graduate, Humeau’s work as a speculative designer and director of a design trilogy is concerned with reconnecting extinct, unknown or physically unreachable lives.

Humeau’s work has been recognised internationally through various awards, exhibitions and publications and is part of the MoMA New York permanent collection.

Michael Grigoriev

As a design strategist much of Grigoriev’s work explores the role design plays in prompting social change.

Grigoriev is particularly concerned with the role design should play in addressing the world’s more pressing challenges and his role within this emerging landscape.

Currently doing research for his Master of Design at Carleton University, Grigoriev is looking at how design initiatives in development work can be strengthened by crowdsourcing and drawing on local community knowledge.  

Howard Chambers & Bland Hoke

Howard Chambers and Bland Hoke are both recent graduates from the Transdisciplinary Design MFA programme at Parsons the New School for Design. This is where they met and put their heads together to work on Softwalks.

After researching sidewalk sheds (tunnels of scaffolding in NYC) Softwalks designed a "Kit of Parts," a selection of improvements, such as chairs and planters, that can be added to standard sidewalk sheds.

The kit is for placemaking so you can sit, chat and take a break in a new novel place.

Through Softwalks, Chambers and Hoke’s goal is to work with neighborhood organisations, local businesses, and public officials in the US and internationally. They hope to design more livable public places using strategies that intersect creative placemaking, tactical urbanism and responsible design practice.

Don’t miss any of it! Book now for Design Indaba Conference, taking place in Cape Town from 27 February to 1 March 2013. 

Watch the Talk with Pieter-Jan Pieters