With a focus on international thought leadership, the annual Design Indaba Conference has become one of the world’s leading design events, featuring the best of global creativity on one stage.
While working at the Jupiter Drawing Room in Cape Town, I was part of the team that conceived and delivered marketing campaigns to attract conference delegates from around the world.
DIXIV – PRODUCTS OF THE FUTURE
Demonstrating an aspiration that through creativity comes upliftment, our “DIXIV” campaign presented a fictitious company that sold fictitious products offering creative solutions to present-day problems, advertising these across media channels as if they actually existed. The campaign culminated in a Design Indaba Expo stand that, through augmented reality, brought the products and their benefits to life.
THE CREATIVE PLAYING FIELD.
As a sport’s fanatical country, South Africa has a national team for almost every sport. In the year we hosted the World Cup, this fanaticism had never been clearer.
Deciding creativity deserved its due, we took inspiration from this and welcomed Design Indaba delegates to the ‘Creative Playing Field’. Teaming the international conference speakers as touring All-Stars, we developed a Design Indaba Expo campaign around finding South Africa’s first national Creative Team; the Superstars. Hundreds of South Africans tried out, but the big team reveal happening at the Expo itself. The prize: National creative fame. The Design Indaba Superstars’ winning entries were immortalised as a public art installation and a limited-edition portfolio of their artwork was produced.
‘I AM NOT A DESIGNER’
Delegates would agree that the Design Indaba is so much more than just another conference.
This campaign positioned the modern designer as not just a designer, but rather an activist, a reformer, an agitator, a liberator. Someone who can harvest peace, unity and happiness within society. And the conference that all these designers go to – an idea-generating, change activating forum.
Across all conference collateral we defined what creatives bring to the world. With the help of a creative manifesto, we explained the value of design and encouraged designers to use it as a tool to make a difference to the world. The look and feel represented the creative thoughts as amorphous, organic shapes that hinted at the incredible ideas and objects they represented.
