Design Indaba

Today we launch the rolling out of the 25th edition of the Design Indaba Conference talks, with Ghananian chef Selasie Atadika.

Atadika delivered a powerful talk expressing culinary arts and food as a form of design, cultural preservation and political agency. Inspired by her past experience in international affairs which led to her work at UNICEF, she propositioned that what societies eat shapes health systems, economies and environmental outcomes making cuisine a critical but often overlooked infrastructure.

Atadika draws attention to Africa’s heavy reliance on imported staples, a dependency that undermines local agriculture and food sovereignty. The chef advocates for a renewed investment in indigenous crops and traditional knowledge, noting that many African food practices which include plant-based ingredients zero-waste cooking, fermentation and the use of climate-resilient grains predate contemporary global wellness trends.

Central to Chef Atadika’s message is concern over the rapid loss of culinary heritage due to urbanisation, industrial agriculture and generational disconnect. The erosion, she argued, threatens biodiversity, nutrition and Africa’s cultural identities. However, rather than advocating nostalgia, Atadika proposes a new paradigm “New African Cuisine”, a concept that evolves while remaining rooted in indigenous knowledge. In a multisensory element of her talk, she embodied this concept by taking audience members through a tasting journey of African ingredients.

Atadika’s talk expresses how food can be used as a connection between people to their land, history and one community, as well as a pathway toward a sustainable African future rooted in dignity, resilience, and self-determination across the continent.

Visit the link in our bio to watch 's full talk at the Conference

Antya Waegemann was one of the young global graduates selected to present at the 25th edition of the Conference in Cape Town.

Design Indaba curates the selection of global graduates together with the heads of more than 40 design institutes and colleges around the world. The selection is guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Each change-maker must demonstrate social or environmental impact, engagement with global challenges, project feasibility, and an exceptionally high level of innovation.

In 2019, Antya graduated from the MFA Products of Design programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she worked on a year-long thesis exploration entitled ‘When No-one Believes You: Redesigning R**e Kits and Responses to Sexual Assault’.

As part of this exploration, she has become a sexual assault advocate at the New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and has designed six different products, services and apps that aim to solve the problem of how the US and other countries respond to sexual assault and sexual assault survivors.

Her ingenious products and services include Hark, a speculative over-the-counter post-r**e health kit and r**e kit service, and RN Advocate (RNA), a r**e kit for emergency-room nurses, for which she won the 2019 Graduate Design Award from ICFF x Interior Design magazine during NYCxDESIGN Week.

Her SAFE is a ‘911’ app for sexual assault; Code, is a DNA-detecting medical device; and Redesign the Kit, is a public exhibition of the r**e kit; while Allay is a r**e kit-tracking app.

British-born graphic artist Patrick Thomas has his finger on the pulse of socio-political movements. His handy Protest Stencil Toolkit helps the ‘woke’ generation create protest graphics for modern-day activism, and he’s ever ready to comment on hot-button topics.

Collaboration has always been an important part of Patrick’s practice, even if he’s conceiving projects alone.

Speaking Conference Patrick Thomas described the importance of making people collaborate. Together with his partner Jonathan Auch, they walked the Design Indaba audience through their newly developed Open Collab 2.0 platform, an interactive tool for creatives to endlessly collaborate.

Prior to their Design Indaba talk, they had done a two week trialing of the new Open Collab tool. Throughout a two-week tour of South Africa’s design schools in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Which they then presented and launched at Design Indaba as part of their talk.

He framed an acerbic response to the 2013 horse-meat scandal in the UK, in which six carcasses tainted with an anti-inflammatory drug were passed off as beef and may have been eaten by the Queen – his billboard poster depicted a horse with the word “Moo” above it, in large typeface.

And in an era of fake news and the decay of truth, his installation Breaking News saw him producing a real-time graphic response to live news, using processing and coding software. This encouraged members of the public to engage with how news is received, processed and understood. This ongoing project has since been realised in Manchester, London, Seoul, Novi Saad and Rome.

Thomas believes art has a social function and artists should bear witness to the key events of the age.

He’s passionate about the role of public art – his found poster collages see him depicting the letterforms that populate posters in Berlin, the city in which he now lives.

Watch out for Thomas's talk to be released soon.