South Africa’s Indaba Design Festival spurring innovation, creativity

Every year, the world’s think tanks converge in Foreshore, Cape Town, South Africa for a three-day workshop geared towards sharing the best of their wit with the locals through the Design Indaba Festival.

The three-day event is riveting, eye-opening and inspiring and 2020’s edition which started on February 26 – February 28 has a host of internationally renowned speakers. In it is a package of wisdom wrapped in talks, exhibitions and theatre arts which includes live musical performances; the festival opens yet another round of innovation.

The main event is held in Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town and features a conference, film festival, and exhibitions. Here, innovators give the best of their design speech and illustrations are drawn from different fields such as architecture, product design, graphics, communication, fashion and interior.

Hitherto, Cape Town where Indaba Design Festival is held has hosted over 600 speakers in the last 25 years since the inception of the festival. The history of Design Indaba Festival is pegged on development for the people with special focus shed on personal development through entrepreneurship and other forms of empowerment.

In recent years, over 200 projects with proven impact were launched into the public square courtesy of Design Indaba Festival.

In 1995, a group of innovators founded the festival with just 11 speakers and has evolved to be the best creative conference in Africa. In 2014, the New York Times named it as the best “annual visual arts spectacular”. Besides the Cape Town conference, the festival holds simulcasts in other parts of the world bringing the total number of those who attend the festival to 4,500.

Speakers at the festival confine themselves to the challenges facing the design and creative industries and offer solutions tailored to the international market. The talks are pegged in the festival’s mantra “A better world through creativity”.