In it’s 14th year, the Design Indaba just keeps getting better and better. More serious. More International. More beautiful objects in the expo hall. More minimalist inspirations from Scandinavian furniture magazines.
In it’s 14th year, the Design Indaba just keeps getting better and better. More serious. More International. More beautiful objects in the expo hall. More minimalist inspirations from Scandinavian furniture magazines. More craft and less crafty. More well paid beautiful people weaving their well-paid charging-by-the-hour synapses into issues as diverse as font kernings, InDesign puns and learnings taken from Harmonographic Sound Structures. Design Indaba has managed to capture the imagination of global creatives while keeping the local pride and cool factor. Probably because they combine a great balance of speakers and exhibitors who represent both local and emerging creatives and the successful big businesses they are hopefully one day going to become.
It was a fun busy day of shooting besides some minor distractions, including being caught by the Design Indaba police when I tweeted something about ‘sneaking’ (which proves people are listening to the twitterface machine) and a half-hour debate about the genre of music playing outside Trinity. Is it DubStep, Post-punk Fidget or just Jungle in your dark Garage? It was my first time at Trinity. I had initial reservations after somebody referred to it as a ‘Super-Club’ and suffered a bout of flashbacks which ended with UCT rag week at Dockside with white lasers pulsating to God is a DJ. But the venue blew me away, it’s inter-leading floors and open-facebrick textures between exposed steel trussing giving you the feeling that something very big and very cool is just about to happen. Lindiwe Suttle’s rocked out some new tunes, green-bean stocking people buzzed and glitched outside and Spoek Mathambo the township HotChip Rumpumpampum pumparumpabum’d the party into an entire different level. I’m washing it all down with a throaty golden gush of Grolsch, thinking to myself, who the hell is Dj Invisible?
