by Herman Manson (@marklives) It’s not about skill but about attitude, said Cecilia Martin of Amsterdam-based Lava Lab in the talk by Klasien van de Zanschulp and her on the final day of Design Indaba 2016. Attitude is what made Lava Lab take its invitation to Beijing Design Week 2013 and to the streets of Beijing, literally.
Lava Lab bought a second-hand sanlunche (local three-wheeled vehicle), pimped it up, and drove around Beijing designing logos for local businesses on the spot and free of charge, enabling local businesses to stand out from the crowd and making a real-world design impact.
Image credit: Lava Beijing
Its non-pretentious take on design is also captured in a project for the Amsterdam Museum. An app allows millenials to learn about the masters in their own language, mimicking a social network that engages with students in a way that is already familiar with them. Timelines, messages, friend requests all enable a learning experience that is much cooler than any textbook.
Image credit: Lava Lab
Martin and Van de Zanschulp note that millennials don’t access the web; it is always with them. Their phones are the remote control to their lives and designers need to design for a shared economy — one reason Lava Lab believes in open-source design. It’s not an end product they design but something that may evolve and be modified by their communities.
Herman Manson (@marklives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com. He was the inaugural Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year in 2011 and has, over his 20-year-plus career, contributed to numerous journals and websites in South Africa and abroad, including AdVantage magazine, Men’s Health, Computer World and African Communications.
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