Creative Cape Town

As part of its Creative Cape Town Clusters programme which includes quarterly discussion and networking sessions, the Creative Cape Town Clusters have been meeting regularly at the Bird Cafe monthly. The yummy organic food, ambient recording of bird sounds, sculptured lights of bird and the simple seating arrangements form the backdrop for great informal sessions for sharing. The sessions are aimed largely at design-related professionals and are opportunities for Creative Cape Town to learn from the sector and for those in the sector to network with each other.

Our first session in January was aimed at people who have an interest in establishing a design network or organisation. Our guests were: the award-winning industrial designers from Dot Dot Dot Ex Why Zed Pty Ltd Roelf Mulder and Byron Qually (who have designed such items as the Condom Applicator and the Snuza Baby Monitor); Y Tsai of Tsai Design Studio an award winning architect and designer; Mel Hagan, a self-styled design activist who was previously dean of the faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Town Peninsula University of Technology; and for a time we were joined by Ricky Lee Gordon of Word of Art.

The design sector is currently a very fractured one – there are some bodies for individual disciples like architecture and sector support bodies like CCDI for crafts in the Western Cape but no Design Council type body similar to those which are found in various countries. The plans for “One Voice” a national design body have been stalled for various reasons. The work around World Design Capital and the East City Design Initiative is necessitating a great deal of engagement in the next few months with the design community. For this reason a proposal of a less formal local design network was mooted based on the Creative Cape Town Clusters model that may have the potential to develop into something owned by the sector. A proposal was put forward for Creative Cape Town to drive a project of this nature and as you can see in the article below, we have moved quickly to set up the Cape Town Design Network 2010 in response.

At our second session in February we gathered together the editors of a number of design-related magazines based in the central city. These included Visi, House and Leisure, Elle Decor, Digest of SA Architecture, One Small Seed, Art South Africa and Design Indaba Magazine. As we normally do, we presented our ECDI and World Design Capital bid plans to the group. Andrew Boraine, CE of the Cape Town Partnership elaborated on why these were areas of great importance for the central city as well as the City as a whole. While the editors had a healthy cynical approach to our plans, they also showed a great deal of support and encouragement for the project and most showed interest in being involved.

They recognised the potential for raising the level of design awareness in the city and country. Since all mags have a national and not just local focus, this was an area of considerable discussion and it became apparent that we must engage other cities in South and Southern Africa.