For British designer Thomas Heatherwick "making a difference" with the projects he and his studio tackles is important.
We are not interested in people's private homes or the kind of luxury resorts away from where we all are, he says. The passion is trying to find projects that have a public dimension; were it is possible to do something that doesn't exist in another place.
According to Heatherwick there is nothing more public than designing infrastructure and he continues to discuss two projects, the design of the New London bus and the Garden Bridge.
What we found fascinating is that no design team had been given the task to design this piece of infrastructure. London is famous for its red double-decker buses but it is 50 years since a design team was allowed to think about this bus as one whole project.
Their design for the New London bus restore the hop-on hop-off tradition of the old buses but is three meters longer and uses 40% less energy than its predecessor.
Another infrastructure project that he is working on is the Garden Bridge, a new proposed pedestrian bridge over the River Thames that becomes more than just a transport way but a green public space.
Possibly one of most memorable moments of Design Indaba Conference 2014 is his unveiling of the design for the conversion of the Grain Silo in the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.
Heatherwick himself got a case of the goosebumps as he revealed the concept drawings. The designs see him retain the external integrity of the concrete tubes but carving out a kernel-shaped central space in the heart of the silo. The shafts of the silo tubes are converted into the main vertical circulation areas housing spiral stairs and lifts, while other are topped with skylights to bring light into the central space.
People are fascinated with Africa. And now there is going to be this institution that provide a portal for the world to come back into Africa to understand better the ideas being generated because of this massive, diverse continent's brain power.
