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A collaborative approach to architecture

by Nashid Nabian and Carlo Ratti (a speaker at the 2012 Design Indaba) of MIT SENSEable City Lab The 1965 exhibition Architecture Without Architects, shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and the accompanying book Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture by Bernard Rudofsky, provided a unique view into what Rudofsky defined as “communal vernacular,” “anonymous,” “spontaneous,” “indigenous,” “rural,” “non-formal,” “non-classified,” or “non-pedigreed” architecture. The focus of the exhibition was on architecture created by anonymous, untutored builders who used their good sense to handle practical problems in a synergetic relationship with the environment, implicitly criticizing the narrow orthodoxy of a discipline preoccupied with “architectural nobility” and the work of individual masters. The message of the exhibit and the accompanying publication was that the philosophy and know-how of these builders, and their understanding of the potential and the limits of architecture, present an enormous, untapped source of inspiration. In architectures without architects, the inhabited environments are inspired and directly shaped by their inhabitants.[1]

Not long before the exhibition, John Habraken, a Dutch architect, proposed a model that provided a platform for soliciting the participation of users and residents in the process of building mass-housing projects. In this model, the physical structure of the buildings was conceptually separated into support components and infill components. While the supporting infrastructure would be provided by the state, the infill components were envisioned as housing units that people themselves could build on top of or in the middle of the provided infrastructure (Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, 1961). Habraken defined the key concept of a support structure as, “a construction which allows the provision of dwellings which can be built, altered and taken down, independently of the others,” and that “is built in the knowledge that we can not predict what is going to happen to it.” Hence, he suggested, “the more variety housing can be assumed within the support structure, the better,” promoting an indeterminate design that allowed for a serendipitous outcome once the framework was activated by the action of its intended inhabitants inserting their needs, desires, and preferences to customize it.[2]

Habraken seems influenced to some extent by the architectural discourse of the megastructuralists, and his model can be situated within a collection of ideas elaborated upon by radical architectures of 50s, 60s, and 70s. For example, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (1956-78) artistically explored a radical, utopian, city composed of transformable megastructures interlinked across the earth, providing large-scale, connected and conditioned interior spaces that were open to endless modifications by the users. Yona Friedman’s Mobile Architecture (1958) also made use of megastructures, seeking to empower the user with reconfigurable structures that could sit within the floating points of the “artificial topography” of his Spatial City, or hover above the ground on a minimal number of columns. Buckminister Fuller similarly emphasized the crucial role of the occupant in the design process when he introduced the experimental field of Synergetics (1975) to study total-system behavior.

Over a decade after Architecture Without Architects was first published, Christopher Alexander and his co-authors of the 1977 book A Pattern Language provided an “open-source” methodology for giving people a say in designing their own environments through the use of 253 patterns, or working documents that could be mixed and matched, adjusted and supplemented as needed. Each pattern both described an environmental problem and provided the core of its solution, creating an infinite variety of combinations of multi-layered problems and their corresponding multi-layered solutions.[3]

In a way, all of these alternative ways of thinking about designing built environments are criticizing a centrally planned urbanism favored during the decades following World War II. They echo Jane Jacobs’ critique of those modernist planning policies as destroying inner-city communities by creating dysfunctional settings that ignore local details and human-centered considerations in favor of the “big picture” envisioned by master planners and architects. These plans were typically executed in a top-down approach based on the principles of maximizing vehicular speed and building density, even at the expense of the residents’ quality of life. As a response, the vision of an architecture without architects and an urbanism collaboratively shaped through a pattern language; or the dualistic model of a centrally provided infrastructure filled in by the individual contributions of citizens, promoted a bottom-up paradigm and an innovative way of involving a city’s inhabitants in conceiving, constructing, and repairing their city.

Unfortunately, although inspiring as an approach in addressing the shortcoming of the modernism’s top-down paradigms of city building, and going back to a timeless way of building, these approaches have failed to revolutionize the way we build cities. There is a revealing sentence in the Oregon Experiment by Christopher Alexander, where after advocating for participation he states: “Participation will create chaos.”[4] And, in his most recent book, the Nature of Order:- “the idea of involving users in the discussion, hearing their conflicting visions, trying to reconcile opposing points of view-can become a political and administrative nightmare.”[5]

However, the past few years have demonstrated how new technologies can allow an unprecedented number of people to collaborate. Consider how during the series of 2011 events dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the combination of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare drastically changed both the political landscape of the Middle East and the global understanding of resistance and resilience. When the streets of Cairo erupted in protest, president Mubarak’s government shut down the country’s Internet service and mobile-phone system in an attempt to control the situation. However, a rich ecosystem of blog posts and Facebook and Twitter conversations continued to bring together millions of people to continue the ultimately successful uprising. During Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” the protest organizer Slim Amamou used the mobile app Foursquare to alert his followers of his arrest, resulting in an eruption of urban unrest. In both cases, citizens used new Internet platforms and new applications for their ubiquitous mobile phones to shift resources back and forth from cyberspace to “cityspace” in a bottom-up organization of resistance.[6] In a different socio-political setting, the very same digital tools were used by the Occupy movement to orchestrate large-scale protests in major U.S. cities in 2011. It is therefore logical to ask: could these very technologies have an impact on city building? Could they lead to a more democratic, bottom-up approach to urbanism?

While it might be too early to get a definitive answer, we would like to review some reasons why we believe this might be the case. First, there is the issue of information. In order to address urban problems, citizens must have access to information that will allow them to make well-informed daily decisions about how to effectively use resources and navigate their surroundings, as well as engaging in the decision-making processes of conceiving, constructing, and managing their environments. New Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are making this possible to an unprecedented extent. Real-time traffic information allows citizens to make mobility decisions; location-specific information about cultural and commercial offerings allows them to decide how to best navigate the landscape of urban opportunities; real-time information that cross-associates their individual carbon footprints with pollution levels can effectively impact their energy consumption, and the list goes on. To this effect, democratizing access to urban information – as it is happening with open data initiatives all across the world – allows citizens to participate in optimizing how the space of the city is used.

One example of engaging members of a diverse community in ICT-enhanced urban optimization is the LIVE Singapore! project created by MIT SENSEable City lab. LIVE Singapore! is an open platform for the collection, elaboration, and distribution of real-time data on urban activity. On one hand, LIVE Singapore! closes the feedback loop between people moving in the city and the digital data collected across multiple networks that reflect their actions. Giving people visual and tangible access to real-time information about their environment enables them to make decisions that are more in sync with what is actually happening around them. On the other hand, this platform is not aimed at one single application. Instead, it resembles an informatics ecosystem within which a community of developers can build multiple applications, extracting new value from real-time data.[7]

Second, ICTs can facilitate innovative solutions to urban problems by leveraging the culture, contemporary practice, and well-established models of user-generated, content-sharing and collaborative, knowledge-production platforms like subject-specific open forums and wikis. This approach is not new to design: one existing model is OpenIDEO, an online social platform launched by the technological design company IDEO.

Since August of 2010, OpenIDEO has actively solicited the involvement of a global community of designers and the public in important social projects.[8] The platform introduces several challenges, each tackling a well-defined problem area in the field of designing improvements in the quality of human life, while taking into account the limitations of real-world conditions and concerns about environmental impacts. For each challenge, it offers room for all interested parties to directly contribute ideas or relevant information that may inspire other designers. The underlying force of this and other crowdsourcing platforms is the fact that an active, globally connected crowd can outperform the internal design teams of professional, technology-based “innovation” companies. The goal is not to promote one model over the other, but to orchestrate collaborations amongst teams of technological experts, innovation companies, venture capital startups, academic research and development institutions, and the members of a broader community of socially pro-active and technologically savvy individuals.

Yet, in promoting various degrees and forms of user participation, bottom-up urbanism is not solely focused on democratizing access to information or providing a platform for collaborative innovation, but also on crowdsourcing information about the dynamics of the city to address the urgent need for more egalitarian participation. Bottom-up urbanism can introduce a paradigmatic shift in how we design, build, maintain, and inhabit our cities. Conceptual forerunners like Architectures Without Architects utilized the genius of the crowd using elementary models of knowledge sharing. Now, modern online platforms for collaborative idea-generation and sharing, such as the Open Architecture Network launched by Architecture for Humanity, can transform architectural design from copyrighted phenomena into the property of the Creative Commons. This means that anyone can access blueprints and design schemes for each and every space within the city, using interactive software applications, relational data, and parametric inter-connectivity.

These collaborative networks can also provide a platform for people to share how they receive, evaluate, and critique a particular design for the city they live in. The same model can also be deployed to create new, collaborative paradigms for funding urban/infrastructural projects through digitally mediated micro-donations, as well as envisioning ecologies of mass-ownership, or mass-authorship for large-scale urban initiatives and projects.[9]

From democratizing access to real-time urban information, to providing cyber platforms that allow people to participate in addressing and solving urban challenges, to crowdsourcing the collection of information about how the city operates and is used, we believe that the coming years might be full of promise for the “bottom” up paradigm of how our cities are planned, conceived, built, inhabited, managed, and restored or repaired (as in the case of natural disasters or civic conflicts). In short, a continuous and innovative re-programming of the built environment by its own inhabitants.

[1] Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without architects, an introduction to non-pedigreed architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964):1-9.

[2] NJ Habraken, Supports: An alternative to mass housing (London: Architectural Press, 1972): 59-61.

[3] Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel, A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

[4] Christopher Alexander et al., The Oregon Experiment (New York : Oxford University Press, 1975):45.

[5] Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order : an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe (Berkeley, Calif. : Center for Environmental Structure, 2002-c2005): 261.

[6] For more examples, please see: Carlo Ratti and Anthony Townsend, “The Social Nexus,” Scientific American, September 2011: 41-48

[7] For more information on the project, please visit the project website at http://senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/

[8] For more information on the platform, please visit it at http://www.openideo.com/

[9] Examples of such platforms already in operation are www.sponsume.com/ and www.kickstarter.com/, which both allow their users to sollicit funding and support for the their projects by capitalizing on the potential of social networks.

Reprinted with permission – Carlo Ratti .First published under the title ‘Top-Down/Bottom-up Urbanism’

Design Indaba 2012: John Bielenberg is wrong (and right about it)

by Herman Manson It seems like graphic designer John Bielenberg will not be defined solely by his creative credentials. And there are plenty of those, including arms-full of awards, exhibitions, honorary degrees and fellowships.

Bielenberg is also an entrepreneur, an educator and a proponent of ‘thinking wrong’ – somebody who sees conventional thinking as a threat to creativity and design. Often, says Bielenberg, the creative process goes something like this – get brief, boom, solution – designers become victims of their own heuristic neural pathways (learned, pre-determined behaviour). Thinking wrong disrupts that process and offers the potential for truly creative solutions.

One of Bielenberg’s best known initiatives is Project M, an annual initiative that helps design students think about design with a social consciousness. Project M famously created the Mbulance, an old ambulance his students converted into a rolling design studio, which donated equipment and supplies to Gulf Coast designers displaced by hurricane Katrina.

Another Project M initiative was Free Pie which started when a Project M student revealed her hidden talent to be making pies. In a tough economy free pie and coffee draw people together and gives them an opportunity to have a conversation.

From this humble idea arose PieLab in rural Alabama. PieLab was established as an eatery that could bring a still racially segmented community together in a neutral space. It became so popular that soon a bigger space was required, a space, that on a budget of US$9 000, took second place at the James Beard awards for restaurant design (the entry for the new restaurant at the Guggenheim won).

More recently he partnered with Alex and Ana Bogusky (from Crispin Porter + Bogusky fame) and Rob Schuham to form COMMON, which is focused on social entrepreneurship and aims to ‘replace competitive advantage with collaborative advantage’, and with Greg Galle to launch FUTURE, a similar concept but that works with larger organisations and enterprises to drive positive change in the world.

Bielenberg is visiting South Africa as a guest speaker at Design Indaba 2012 taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, from today, 29 February until 2 March. He also brought along COMMON Pitch: South Africa, which takes place on 29 February at Cape Town’s City Hall, where social innovation start-up teams will compete for a R200 000 prize by pitching, in five minutes each, their business ideas to a panel of judges.

Manson: Tell us more about the concept behind ‘thinking wrong.’
Bielenberg: At the core of how humans make decisions and solve problems is a process that drives the brain to solutions that are familiar, predictable and comfortable. This may be efficient, but it doesn’t necessarily produce truly creative or unique solutions.

We now live in a world that is not sustainable, that the relationship between humans and the natural world is out of balance, and that creativity and design are one of the only ways we can avoid disaster. Conventional solutions that reinforce the status quo are unacceptable and dangerous.

Thinking wrong is a process that helps you break free from the boundaries of common, everyday thinking, towards clearer, more innovative ways of thinking and doing.

Manson: Lots of people feel powerless in affecting any positive change as individuals. What do you tell them?
Bielenberg: Yes, it is true that the scale of our global issues can be overwhelming. However, I think the important thing is to just do something positive and not worry about huge impact. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.

Manson: You are a strong proponent of collaborative design. Why is a collaborative approach to design something so many designers struggle with and why is it important for them to change their ways in this regard?
Bielenberg: The simple answer is that I just like working with others. Especially people who are amazing creative thinkers in disciplines different than my own field. Ideas can be imagined that would be unable to conceive otherwise. In addition, many projects today require a large diverse team. More like a movie crew than the lone designer genius working by himself in a studio.

Manson: Do you think the current global patent system is open to exploitation and that it might in fact stifle design rather than encourage it?
Bielenberg: I don’t know much about patents, but I feel that protecting ideas for profit or self-interest is generally stifling creativity and innovation. I’m much more interested in “we” than in “me.” I have virtually no interest in legal issues around this issue.

Manson: When you talk about a new brand of capitalism, what do you mean?
Bielenberg: I’ve been influenced by some of the concepts presented in a book called The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque and am trying to imbed some basic core values like transparency, sustainability, collaboration and community into for-profit ventures. It’s about a belief in abundant value versus scarce value.

Manson: You believe business should contribute to/do good in the communities they operate in – one would think that this would be a universal truth but the reality on the ground is quite different. Can design help solve this?
Bielenberg: Whew! That’s a tough question. However, I do believe that all enterprise must become social enterprise if we are to have any hope of a positive future. It just makes sense. The idea that generating short-term shareholder value should drive corporate decision making is an antiquated idea and businesses that cling to this model will not thrive in the future.

Manson: How aware are you of South Africa’s design profile in the States?
Bielenberg: To be honest, I’m not aware of any South African design profile in the US. So, I’m glad that Design Indaba is helping to fix this!

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

Media corrections and our social reputations

by Herman Manson The modern news cycle has been diminished to a matter of minutes — even less on services like Twitter. And it seems to just keep speeding up.

As newsrooms become increasingly hard pressed to produce news content quickly — very quickly — they find themselves facing an audience that demands near immediate reporting on events and expects that reporting to be factually correct.

But journalists make mistakes too and maybe as a profession it has sold itself into the ‘we are relevant because we only publish the facts’ corner too effectively. ‘You can trust that we will be transparent in how we publish news by declaring any conflict of interest, by upholding journalistic standards and by publishing corrections when me make mistakes’, is maybe the best we can promise.

Publishing corrections is a near every day function of any news organisation. Newspapers publish notices in their pages, but of course the original story remains published and in the public domain, for posterity, or until the last copy of the paper makes it way to the fish and chip shop.

On the web newspapers have adopted various approaches to dealing with corrections. The New York Times maintains an index of corrections, adds a note to the story declaring that an aspect of it has been corrected as well as showing the affected sentence with the changes made for easier identification at the end of the story.

The Guardian offers an Article History on all its stories to indicate not only when they were first published but when they were last updated.

Of course, sometimes a story is fundamentally wrong, so much so that no correction can set it right, and it is withdrawn. In print, the editors publish their withdrawal, and usually the reasons for publishing the incorrect story in the first place, as well as the steps they will take to ensure future errors get caught in time.

Online, however, the inclination to hit ‘delete’ runs strong. In 2010 the Huffington Post published a story headlined “Could The 2010 World Cup Be A Disaster In the Making?” At the time sections of the pony press were running wild tales about darkest Africa and the nightmare that awaits visitors to the 2010 FIFA World Cup which South Africa hosted, as it turns out, quite successfully.

According to the Huffington Post story by Jeffrey Hoffman, “most would agree that three of the major venues, Johannesburg, Durban, and Capetown [sic] are cities where lawless mobs run rampant and threaten both classes on a regular daily basis.” That was the second draft of the story by the way — the original described the supposed lawless mobs in more detailed terms – but it got edited out after at least one reader posted his outrage in the forum below the story.

Hoffman also suggested concerned readers Google the Johannesburg Times, a newspaper that does not exist, for more on the horrors visitors would be subjected to.

The noise the story caused on social networks like Twitter prompted the editors at The Huffington Post to rethink the column in its entirety and it got, not retracted, but deleted. Just like that the content was gone, without explanation, no reasons given. Only after the matter was raised directly with the editorial team at the Huffington Post was the following statement posted in place of the original column: ‘Editor’s Note: Jeffrey Hoffman’s post, “Could The 2010 World Cup Be A Disaster In the Making?,” has been removed due to factual inaccuracy and inflammatory language.’

More recently, a two line statement by the South African Reserve Bank caused not only a mild panic on the local financial markets but also caused the widely respected Mail & Guardian Online, sister site of the similarly titled weekly newspaper, to publish a story based on speculation as to the reason behind the bank’s announcement, then to delete it without proper notice given as to the reason for doing so, and finally to replace it with a different article that does not acknowledge the errors made in the original reporting.

Originally headlined ‘Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus could step down’ the story was soon replaced with another titled ‘Reserve Bank’s Gill Marcus not stepping down’ (note both make use of the original URL /article/2012-02-10-reserve-bank-governor-gill-marcus-could-step-down/). The Mail & Guardian also used its Twitter feed to announce the possible resignation of Marcus, plus a link to the news story, which was retweeted multiple times by its followers (it’s a trusted news source so why not). The tweet disappeared shortly after.

At least the Twitter account offered an explanation for pulling the story — ‘Apologies, we’ve provisionally withdrawn that last story while we clear a few things up. Please disregard until we repost.’ Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes also tried to calm nerves by tweeting “Right. Everyone calm down. There’s nothing terrible, dramatic, or market moving happening at the Reserve Bank.”

The website simply gave the error message ’404 page not found.’

Once the replacement story was up no acknowledgement was made of possible errors in the previous article, no notice was given that the original story had been taken down, or that it was replaced with a second updated version. A version that, as evidenced by the change in headlines, told a rather different story.

There is nothing wrong with, to borrow a phrase by Poynter, reporting the truth as it develops. The issue is that while the Mail & Guardian Online rectified the original story, it did not do so in a way that was either transparent or accountable to their readers.

The BBC News website in June 2011 reported on a dog condemned to stoning in Jerusalem. It was followed a few days later by a denial published as Jerusalem court denies dog condemned by stoning. The editors at the BBC had decided to remove the original story from the website, but did so while publishing a proper explanation of their decision.

This is a much more useful approach to deleting content, which on news sites should be the last option available to editors. Readers know what’s happening to the content on the link they followed through some social media platform or another and it alerts them that there are factual issues with the original story, something they can feed back to the sources they followed to the removed story.

It seems appropriate that if news organisations are going to rely on readers spreading and promoting their content, they also offer those same readers a chance to realise when the news they are posting onto their Facebook pages and retweeting contains errors, after all, it’s their reputations on the line as well.

First published in Memeburn.com

The most popular mobile phone in South Africa is …

by Arthur Goldstuck With the world’s attention on the Mobile World Congress and the very latest in smartphones, we ask: which is the most popular mobile phone in South Africa? You may never have heard of it.

Mainstream media tend to be heavily focused on the very latest, very shiniest phones on the market, or on the very coolest apps that feed these phones. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, it is all about what can dazzle the most. As a result, no one seems to notice the humble devices that truly underpin this market.

So, despite only 20% of phones in use in South Africa being smartphones, the category gets 99% of the attention. Yet, 32-million South Africans use devices called “feature phones”, the regular phones that can’t be upgraded.

Within this number lurks one of the great secrets of the South African cellular market, namely the most popular phone model in South Africa. No, not one of the BlackBerry messaging marvels. Certainly not the iPhone, with its huge iWallet requirement.

The most popular phone in South Africa is the “unknown” Samsung E250. Of course, it is not unknown to the vast number of young users who have bought it for just a few hundred rand. For their money, they get a slide-out phone with an FM radio, music player, camera, Web browser, stopwatch, memory card slot, Bluetooth, USB port, Java games …

The only thing it doesn’t allow is multi-tasking. But you can listen to the radio – at no cost – while performing any other task.

It is possibly the only phone on the market that is more than five years old and is still being manufactured today. It was introduced in 2006, but is still so popular today, particularly in South Africa, that the production line continues to churn it out, in an updated E250i version.

Total sales in South Africa to date: 4,5-million. That is about the total of all BlackBerry models ever sold in South Africa.

It’s not the only “unknown” phone that is better known at the lower end of the market than any BlackBerry. Several low-cost Nokia models also make the grade here. The 5130 XpressMusic, a basic smartphone focused on music, probably comes close to the E250, both in low cost and in high sales volumes.

But the real power of Nokia’s market share comes from its broad range of low-cost phones that meet the needs of almost any category of user in lower income groups. The 1200 range, in particular, is aimed at first-time users, or those with only basic needs and understanding of a phone’s features. And it has been more in demand than any smartphone.

The popularity of these phones is often simply a case of the right phone for the right market.

The E250 became Samsung’s first single phone model to reach 30-million sales around the world. It achieved the first 10-million sakes in just ten months, showing that South Africa was part of a global trend.

Says Deon Liebenberg, MD of Samsung South Africa, “During the E250 launch in 2006, over 30 000 units were sold immediately. Half a decade later, we are still witnessing a steady sales pattern with regards to this product.”

Another hugely popular feature-rich phone from the same stable, the Star, or S52330, took just six months to reach the 10-million mark globally after it was launched into the youth market in 2007, and remains hugely popular in South Africa. It has also passed the 30-million mark worldwide (by way of comparison, the flagship Samsung Galaxy S II high-end smartphone just reached 20-million).

Both phones allow the user to download and install the Opera Mini browser. Because Opera is open with its user numbers, it offers a fascinating insight into phone trends across Africa. And it confirms the popularity of these low-cost phones.

Opera Mini figures for June 2011 showed that, of the top ten handsets using the Opera Mini browser in South Africa, number 1 was the Nokia 5130, number 5 the Samsung E250i, and number 10 the original E250.

In Zambia, strangely, the E250 was number one on the list.

The astonishing thing about these phones is that they attract no media buzz whatsoever. Because American analysts are narrowly obsessed with smartphone market share, they are oblivious to the phones that shape the global market. As a result, their commentary is not only irrelevant to developing markets, but entirely ignorant.

Like the little train that could, these little phones confound all preconceptions

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Design Indaba 2012: Where it’s at

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Cape Town is gearing up to host one of the world’s premier design conferences – the 2012 Design Indaba. Design Indaba regular and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut will MC this years’ event alongside Michelle Constant and Khaya Dlanga. The conference takes place 29 February-March 2012 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and the expo (which is open to the general public) takes place 2-4 March 2012.

You never quite know who will be the standout speakers at the annual three-day celebration of design and the design economy. What you do know is that you are likely to be surprised by who wins you over. Not Martha Stewart of glitter pork fame or the guys from Google fawning on and on about The Founder.

Last year, Mexican designer and founder of Taller Flora fashion label, Carla Fernandez, stood out with her inspirational presentation on and celebration of traditional Mexican clothing design and textiles. The simplicity of squares and rectangles in traditional clothing design made it possible for local indigenous communities with little tailoring skills to manufacture her designs, providing not only jobs but also keeping traditional methods alive. Burkina Faso architect Francis Kéré thoroughly dashed notions of Western design superiority with his low-tech community orientated approach to architecture.

This year will be no different. Based on previous experience, I suspect the architects speaking at the event on innovative approaches to urban design will again steal the show. Look out for local architect Heinrich Wolff to open the day on Thursday and for Bjarke Ingels (named Wall Street Journal’s Architectural Innovator of 2011) who will be the final speaker on Friday.

There is also a good sprinkle of South African design heroes in the speaker mix this year. In fact, the conference opens properly with a talk by MD Charl Thom and creative director Justin Gomes of agency FoxP2 – widely considered to be one of SA’s best creative agencies. The agency took top ranking at the Loeries again last year, beating many of its significantly larger creative rivals.

Other speakers on the opening day of the conference includes John Bielenberg, a design maverick and social entrepreneur, and a proponent of turning conventional thinking upside down, as articulated in his ‘thinking wrong’ philosophy (where conventional thinking is a treat to creativity and unique solutions). Landscape designer Dan Pearson, head chef of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen; René Redzepi; Pentagram partner Eddie Opara, artists and designers Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin; and the founders of urban design firm Urban-Think Tank are also speaking.

The ever-popular Design Indaba Pecha Kucha, which showcases the work of young designers, also takes place on the opening day.

Thursday sees Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis of Hellicar & Lewis, furniture designers Greg Gamble and Philippe van der Merwe from Tonic design, architect Y Tsai of Tsai Design Studio and Cape-Town design hero Porky Hefer (best known for his work ‘Cratefan’ – the giant statue built with recycled Coke crates – in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront) take to the Design Indaba stage.

The afternoon will be given to filmmaker Akshat Verma, art and design practice United Visual Artists (made up of Ash Nehru, Chris Bird and Matt Clark), Dutch furniture designer Piet Hein Eek and French designer Mathieu Lehanneur.

On the final day of the conference, look forward to a talk by another South African made good globally, Clive van Heerden, director of Design-Led Innovation at Philips Design, the team behind the emotive-clothing concept Time magazine named one of the world’s Best Inventions of 2007.

Top-rated chef and author Gastón Acurio, scent expert Sissel Tolaas, interaction designer Andrew Shoben, Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, and artist Carsten Höller and Carlo Ratti and Assaf Biderman of the SENSEable City Laboratory also all present on Friday.

The conference itself is closed to members of the public but they are invited to the Design Indaba’s annual expo, which aims to showcase exceptional design across various disciplines, and although you are unlikely to find any bargains, you might well unearth a few treasures. It opens Friday-Sunday and tickets are R60.

Don’t forget about the Design Indaba Filmfest at the Labia on Orange – a giveaway at R30 a ticket.

Sónar, the electronic music festival, will be presenting “A Taste of Sónar” in Cape Town during Design Indaba on 2 March. Tickets for the event are R250 for general admission and available through Computicket.

With Common Pitch: South Africa, taking place on 29 February at Cape Town’s City Hall, social innovation start-up teams will compete for a R200 000 prize by pitching, in five minutes each, their business ideas a panel of judges. Tickets are R150 at the door.

Finally, Design Indaba has ceased publication of its quarterly Design Indaba magazine, in favour of a format-neutral project approach which saw the creation this year of an innovative magazine edited by Richard Hart, titled ‘Where it’s at.’ Billed as a survey of SA creativity, it will consists of 84 text pages, 28 gatefold posters and a cover that folds out as a colourfully large map of Africa.

Future projects could be produced as DVDs, a documentary, a coffee table book or a poster collection (in short, nobody knows and anything goes).

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

At last, co.za grows up

by Arthur Goldstuck After more than a decade of market demand, the process of co.za domain registration in South Africa has finally been modernised and the market for domain name registrations has been opened up.

For the first time since website domain registration began in South Africa, a near-instant registration system has been introduced that allows for interactive control panel management and live registration detail updates.

Until recently, anyone wanting to register a co.za domain had to fill in an obtuse form and e-mail it to UniForum, the company responsible for administering domain name registrations in South Africa since the mid-1990s.

Now, both UniForum and domain registrations are evolving. UniForum is becoming a central registry for domains, which will probably go hand-in-hand with a name change for the organisation. In turn, it will offer accreditation to independent registrars, who will be able to allow customers to register domains directly via an Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP). (See http://registry.coza.net.za/doku.php for detailed background)

UniForum’s role will become more of a behind-the-scenes one that entails the maintenance of the registry of domains in the country whereas the registration will be the role of service providers that have a direct interface with the registry.

The fast-tracked registration process is made possible by UniForum’s adoption of an internationally-recognised domain registration protocol known as Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), which is both more advanced and more secure than UniForum’s legacy system. Over time, EPP could replace the legacy system entirely.

Hosting service provider DiaMatrix recently became the first .co.za Registrar in South Africa to register domains on UniForum’s new EPP system. Last month, the company unveiled its own Multi-Registrar EPP Control Panel, at www.domains.co.za. The Domains Control Panel allows DiaMatrix to certify other service providers / or corporate clients as Registrars of domains.

“The control panel turns ISPs into certified Registrars within 35 minutes, eradicating their need to develop their own plugin, saving development time and money,” says DiaMatrix CEO Wayne Diamond.

“The DiaMatrix Multi-Registrar Control Panel speaks directly to the UniForum EPP system via the Registrar’s account details and allows the Registrar to register new domains and manage all other domain names effectively from within the Control Panel, or CP. The CP also allows the Registrar to import all Legacy domains into their account and manage them from there. DiaMatrix is also currently the only Registrar that has successfully migrated legacy domains to the new EPP system.”

Becoming a Registrar with UniForum requires a two-fold accreditation process.

“The Registrar documentation is first completed and this is then followed by the Registrar’s Technical Accreditation, which requires that every technical element performs successfully before UniForum will approve it technically and allow the Registrar to move on to the next step in the approval process.”

Typically, says Diamond, for an ISP to develop its own integrated CP, they would need two to three months development time, followed by another two months in the “sandbox” before migrating to the live .co.za system. DiaMatrix’s Multi-Registrar EPP CP at www.domains.co.za was developed over 18 months in conjunction with UniForum, and allows other ISPs to short-circuit their own development time.

The system is fully white-labelled, allowing any information pertaining to a domain on UniForum to reflect the ISP’s brand and not that of DiaMatrix.

An API (Application Programing Interface) used by DiaMatrix will allow ISPs to integrate the system into their own billing solutions. It allows for domain functionalities, such as registrations, deletes and updates via the EPP system. It already includes functionality like domain lock, auto renew and DNS, along with various other features.

The system allows legacy domains – those registered under the old system – to be migrated to the new system. However, once this move has been made, they can’t be moved back to the old system.

“South Africa has now moved in line with international standards, from an old e-mail-based legacy system, to an international standards-based online solution,” says Diamond.

The DiaMatrix domains system is available to all ISPs / corporates at a low cost as an initial promotion.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Rapport follows City Press with glossy magazine supplement launch

by Herman Manson Rapport has followed the path set out by City Press late last year by awarding its magazine supplement, My Tyd, to content marketing firm New Media.

New Media launched i magazine for City Press in October 2011. The magazine, which has been distributed with the paper in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, aims to mimic the UK markets’ high-end Sunday magazine reads.

Rapport approached New Media shortly after the launch of i, initially wanting to translate the magazine for the Afrikaans market. It’s in line with the dual-language magazine strategy Media24, which owns both City Press and Rapport, as well as a majority stake in New Media, often employs. The combined dual-language circulation of the magazine would have shot it into the big-circulation leagues.

Scratching beneath the surface a little, the New Media team soon realised that the markets for City Press and Rapport are so divergent that simply translating the magazine into an Afrikaans edition would not fly with Rapport readership.

A new plan was drawn up to produce a unique Sunday magazine read for the Afrikaans market. It will retain the name of the current Rapport

magazine supplement, My Tyd, but will be produced on glossy paper as an A4-format 40-page magazine.

The first issue will debut 4 March 2012 and will be distributed nationally. The first print run is around 300 000. As much as 70% of the content will be original content commissioned for My Tyd, and the other 30% may borrow lifestyle content from i magazine, but even that will be carefully rewritten in Afrikaans, rather than simply translated, promises New Media’s content director Clare O’Donoghue.

My Tyd will continue to carry TV listings for Rapport. It will also carry short, byte-sized lifestyle content and columns, with a main feature tucked in the middle alongside some one-page reads. The back of the magazine will consist of puzzles, a kids’ page and star signs. Production values are a huge leap on the current incarnation of My Tyd.

New Media has appointed Elmari Rautenbach as the launch editor. Rautenbach is currently the national books editor for Media24’s Afrikaans daily newspapers, is a former editor of Insig magazine and a former deputy editor of Drum magazine.

My Tyd is expected to attract a younger demographic to Rapport and will cater to the changing, more urban Afrikaans demographic. It is also hoped that it will entrench loyalty and create a larger regular readership for the newspaper.

O’Donoghue says that when media products face circulation declines, as the newspaper industry does in general, is when the best and most innovative work often gets done. The just-released ABC figures for Q4 2011 shows 97 000 fewer (-6.7%) daily papers sold, compared to the same quarter of the previous year, while circulation for weekly papers reflected a decline of 3% or 17 000 copies. Weekend papers declined by a whopping 4.9% (108 000 copies) over the prior year, with Rapport dropping 9.22%. The revised magazine supplement strategy rewards readers for buying newspapers, argues O’Donoghue.

Producing a weekly title has been a challenge, admits New Media’s business development director Andrew Nunneley. Even so, the team has managed to consistently maintain the quality of i, and should for My Tyd, in spite of the pressured deadline environment.

New Media has had to invest in larger editorial teams than initially expected, admits Nunneley. My Tyd will have six dedicated staffers and share the New Media production team. Most of the writing will be outsourced to freelance writers.

On City Press and i magazine, Nunneley says the magazine has been well-received and that its footprint will soon extend into provinces beyond its current markets in KZN and Gauteng. It has helped build awareness of the new City Press positioning and is in line with the papers on-going repositioning to cater for a broader audience. New Media has also launched the City Press ViP Club on the back of the magazine. A tablet app is also in the works for i, although details on the timing of its launch isn’t available yet.

Nunneley says New Media is looking for further magazine supplement opportunities within the Media24 group. Having signed up both an English and Afrikaans language supplement in the Sunday market, the Saturday and/or Friday market remains wide open.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

Magazine covers we love (this week)!

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them. By media blogger MediaSlutZA.

INTERNATIONAL

G Magazine, 2012 (NSFW)

This long standing gay mag (ok – it’s porn) out of Brazil recently updated their look. I’ve included this cover, because I thought the use of the “G” all of the cover was very clever, striking and very sexy.

Esquire, March 2012

I’m subscribed to Esquire so when I received my March issue on Tuesday, I didn’t think too much about it when I saw Jon Hamm on the cover, with the coverline ANIMAL in big red letters. Only later when I started reading the issue did I realise it was actually a fold-out cover. When you unfold the very smart (and intricate) cover, it shows a half-naked Kate Upton, with the coverline “Annihilate the mammal…” A great execution by the Art Department.

LOCAL
Runner’s World, March 2012

The March cover itself isn’t very special, but when you turn the cover, you see a very noticeable and very smart execution of advertising that works so well… Cudo’s to the BMW and Runner’s World advertising teams.

Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated, March 2012

Both titles are part of Media24, both target the same market. Both knew they were bringing out relatively similar covers, simultaneously, featuring Francois Hougaard showing off his tattoo…

According to Sports Illustrated there was no mistake: “No Mistake, we both knew. We discussed the covers beforehand, and thought it was a great idea,” says their tweet when asked about the similar covers.

If this is a test I would love to see the results. Let us know what you think – dumb of smart? [Maybe they saved on the shoot – ed.]

Marie Claire, March 2012 (Annual Naked Issue)

The Annual Marie Claire Naked Issue is something many people look forward to. Not only to see who’s in it, but also who is honoured enough to be on the cover. This year, Jack Parow and his parter Jenna Pietersen are the lucky two. Previously, there has been some Photoshop/retouching scandal, but all things considered, this is a really strong, clean cover, with a toned down version of Jack Parrow, and an uber-sexy Jenna. It’s a much talked about cover, and I’m sure it will show in the copy sales. Visit MediaSlutZA to read my review of the issue.

– The (for now anonymous) blogger behind MediaSlutZA knows way too much for his own good about media in South Africa. Magazines in particular. His mission is to show when South African magazines might fail, but most importantly, succeed. If you’re looking for a library about South African magazines and news, your one-stop pitstop is MediaSlutZA. #MagazinesForTheWin

– Find a cover we should know about? Tweet us @marklives and @mediaslutza

HP: “We’ve got our swagger back”

by Arthur Goldstuck Celebrity CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the headlines at last week’s HP Global Partner Summit, but the key moment was presided over by Jim Zafarana, head of workstations. We ask him about the company’s rebirth.

From his temporary suite on the top floor of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, Jim Zafarana has a clear view, not over the famed Strip, but over McCarran International Import. It is as if the excessively bright lights of Las Vegas are less of a priority than monitoring the arrivals and departures of more than 3000 HP channel partners who are descending on the city.

The Global Partner Summit 2012 represents the first time the pioneers of Silicon Valley have brought together their sales partners from across the world. And Zafarana gets to preside over the early climax of the event: the unveiling of the all-in-one, big-screen, sexy-as-big-machines-get Z1 workstation.

The event also hosts the first public address as new HP boss by celebrity CEO Meg Whitman, former head of eBay and one-time candidate for governor of California.

The key line in Whitman’s address – “We’ve got our swagger back” – says much about the company’s newfound confidence and the market’s reignited expectations. While Whitman delivers the swagger, one of the men at the heart of meeting these expectations is Zafarana, Vice President and General Manager, Commercial Solutions Business Unit.

And he wants no one to be under any illusion about the robust health of the workstation market, even as ordinary PCs face an onslaught from the tablet format.

“The workstation market has two pieces, desktop and mobile workstations,” Zafarana spells it out. “Both have been very healthy and growing very fast over last couple of years. In particular, desktop workstations make up about 73% of all units, mobile 25% of the market. That has been constant.

“The overall workstation market has been growing 18% a year in unit volumes. Our growth has in fact been driving the market. HP is growing at two to three times the rate of the rest of the market.”

The significant trend underpinning this growth is its regional spread.

“Our growth has been both in very mature markets and developing markets. In the Middle East and emerging markets, in some countries we have 60-70% market share. In Brazil, we might have invested in a factory, in India and China, the dynamics are to a certain extent a case of, ‘the ocean rises and we benefit’. But we are more successful because we focus on those countries.”

Zafarana doesn’t have local break-out numbers for South Africa or even Africa. The continent falls under HP’s Europe, Middle-East and African (EMEA) region, and his eyes light up as he talks about its performance.

“This market is amazing. We just got results for the 4th Quarter of 2011. For the first time in the history of our business and industry, we exceeded 50% market share for both desktop and mobile, as well as the total. That includes Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle-East and Africa. That means we’re strong everywhere.”

And it’s not a temporary peak before the trough: “Both volume and market share are still rising steeply.”

This brings Zafarana to the Z1, a workstation that he believes will storm the small and medium enterprise market. On its announcement, a stream of predictable criticism was leveled at HP. One of these was in response to the innovative suitcase design of the back of the machine, which opens up to allow any parts to be slotted in or out without the use of tools.

This feature was characterised by some as putting an emphasis on serviceability, rather than on the ability to re-configure and upgrade. Zafarana says that misses the point.

“We’re trying to empower the industry, to make these very configurable, very serviceable. There are some PC platforms that are locked tight, and the real person who needs to get inside is probably the IT person or service person. But in a small company, it would be the video editor or mechanical designer.“

And then there is the matter of the hard drive, which many workstations hide as far from the user as possible.

“Many customers want to remove the hard drive and keep it locked away due to the sensitivity or importance of the data, or to move it to a new user, and do it quickly. It could be the Bandito Brothers doing a movie, or the military people who, if a helicopter goes down and they have to destroy it, first need to take out the hard drive. The information is that important.

“We are empowering our customers to do what they need to do in a professional environment. I set the direction that the Z1 needs to be serviceable because customers need that feature too.

“It has to have a support model that’s global and reflects what a workstation user needs. You don’t want to send it to an HP store to get it fixed. So we give a three-year next day on site, as part of a global support package. That’s huge. It’s even more important if you’re a small company. If you have two designers and one system is shipped off somewhere, you’re in trouble.”

Zafarana also does not shy away from inevitable comparisons with Apple’s iMac 27” workstation, which introduced the concept of an all-in-one workstation.

“We designed the Z1 for the professional user. We decided we weren’t going to build a consumer technology product, but a professional technology product. We targeted professional applications. When you think that way, now you have to think Adobe has optimised software for NVIDIA graphics, and so has Autodesk. Those users need reliability, so we decided on ECC memory and Intel Xeon chips, which give you that performance edge. These users also need high performance, highly reliable disk access, so we put in a RAID configuration. They need to burn Blu-ray DVDs in real time, so we put in Blu-Ray writers. Professional sound engineers want professional sound, so we built in that capability.

“Add it up: ECC memory, enterprise class hard drives, Blu-ray writing, professional graphics, professional audio in and out. The market can say whether we are competing, but in fact we have a different product.”

A hallmark of HP’s workstations is the extent to which they are developed in partnership with component suppliers. Part of the strength of those partnerships, he says, is that on a technical level, it is a relationship of peers.

“Thirty years ago we didn’t have standard components; we had to develop our own CPU, graphics drivers, motherboards, chassis. This was a vertical business, demanding very high investment.

“As the industry moved, and Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft came into the market, we could move our business. But we still have the people who know how that all works, so when we’re working with NVIDIA, I have somebody who works as a peer with NVIDIA, and has deep knowledge. We do testing with applications on a graphics card, and are able to give feedback to NVIDIA six months before they launch that card. Same with Intel.

“If you ask both companies who their most technically deep technology partner is, it’s my team. I have a deep core competence here. My people have been through many transitions, many technologies, and I hope it shows in the products.”

There was a time, of course, when it was all about performance, with little focus on the user experience. That is still sometimes reflected in the bulky design of the devices the company produces in several categories. It is in fact the sensibility behind the new slogan unveiled with the Z1, “Power without the tower”. It is not only the competition that has tried to embarrass HP about this one.

“Ten years ago we were considering a new platform, and showed it to General Motors, then one of our biggest customers. Their executive walked in, and the first thing he said he didn’t like was the acoustics. Then he held a piece of paper up to the front of the workstation, and the fan sucked it in. That told him the air was moving too fast. My team was very embarrassed.

“That was a single moment in time when we said we needed to focus on issues like acoustic design. Before that, the focus was only on performance. We invented liquid cooling of the workstation, and the technology to control fan speed matured to manage airflows.”

So, while performance remains at the core, other priorities go along with it:

“When you see the systems we design, the cooling, layout, systems and innovation, we start with quality and performance as the base. Another reason you will see we’re serious, is that we’ve been leading on executing the Intel and NVIDIA roadmaps. We’re never late; our customers expect us to be first.”

HP may not have been a start-up for decades now, but the company’s experience, and its continued market-leading results in the workstation arena, says Zafarana, provides some object lessons to start-ups.

“If you’re in a business that’s starting out, or that’s struggling, the way to grow faster or recover is to innovate, change your business, make better products, make new product categories.”

And, within his most practical nugget of advice, unsurprisingly, lurks a hidden message about how workstations can help ramp up your business:

“If you pay someone $100 000, and you want them to work faster, upgrade their infrastructure – it’s the cheapest thing you can do. Its one of the smartest things you can do. ”

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

Lowe drops Bull, Peter Badenhorst joins as ECD

by Herman Manson Lowe Bull is rebranding as Lowe + Partners South Africa after the international parent company acquired a majority share in the local agency. Its two offices become Lowe Johannesburg and Lowe Cape Town.

Lowe + Partners (an Interpublic Group company) bought out Matthew Bull’s shares in the local agency when it took up its call option on the shares at the end of last year. Bull (@stixbull) recently teamed up with another South African, Andrew Whitehouse (@andrewerdna), to launch a New-York-based agency, The Bull-White House.

Always been a minority shareholder

Lowe + Partners had always been a minority shareholder in Lowe Bull, where it played an important strategic role, says Lowe + Partners South Africa CEO Wayne Naidoo (@WNaidoo). The local agency had always been one of the top five agencies in the Lowe network and, with increased client attention on emerging markets and Africa, it made sense for the global network to consolidate and beef up its presence here.

The rebranding takes Lowe + Partners SA closer to the ID and positioning of the global network and is being rolled out over the course of the next month.

Naidoo also announced that Peter Badenhorst has joined the agency as its new ECD for the Johannesburg agency. Badenhorst was the former chief creative partner of M&C Saatchi Abel, of which he was a founding member, for a short time, and before that chief creative officer at Ogilvy Cape Town. He takes up his contract at the beginning of March 2012.

In practical terms, the new majority shareholding doesn’t change the client-facing side of the local business, although changes have been made to its financial reporting system, says Naidoo. The local agency will continue to enjoy access to the people at the top of the network, which Naidoo describes as medium-sized with agencies in only key cities, which gives it scale but also helps retain an intimate work environment, and will continue working on global briefs put into the network.

Global and collaborative approach to client work

“We fly local staff all over the world to work on jobs for the network, which is great for them and for us,” says Naidoo, who says he knows of few agencies with such a global and collaborative approach to client work.

Lowe + Partners SA works extensively across Africa for key clients Unilever and SAB-Miller through affiliate agencies but, as part of the global network’s long-term strategy, the agency will be investigating acquisitions in key African markets, depending upon client needs and local agency environments. Naidoo says that, over the years, his agency has built up a strong foundation for taking work into Africa beyond South Africa, and it knows the rules of engagement well, but they are looking at ways of beefing up that capacity.

In the shorter term, the agency is looking at bulking up its operations in the SA market, with possible acquisitions in the digital and below-the-line segments to deliver on its contemporary integrated client offering. Naidoo says announcements will follow in the coming months.

Badenhorst, meanwhile, has been tasked with bringing the local agency closer to the global Lowe + Partners positioning of “Populist Creativity.” According to Naidoo, this positioning is all about results for clients, storytelling and work that engages the many, rather than the few.

Intention to shake things up, grow

Naidoo says the SA agency enters the year in a stable position, having retained all its key clients through the past couple of years and a tough economy. Its transformation into Lowe + Partners SA signals its intention to shake things up and to grow.

The SA group head count stands at around a 100, while its revenue falls in the R60-80 million band. A BEE trust and local management retain their shareholding in the SA agency.

Lowe + Partners is headquartered in London. The network is owned by New York-based Interpublic, a group that employs approximately 41 800 people and in 2010 had revenues of US$6.5 billion. Apart from Lowe + Partners, it is also the parent company of McCann Erickson and Draftfcb.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.