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Africa Design Lab 2

By on 11th October 2018

28 June 2018

For the 2nd Africa Design Lab meetup the focus shifted towards social entrepreneurship. There is undoubtedly a drive amongst designers to do work that has meaning and purpose. The question becomes how do we open up this space and get more opportunities to do this kind of work? The answer may just be that we have to take action, start collaborating, and see where it takes us.

We also wanted to keep a hands-on workshop component to the meetup so we ran a workshop on mental model mapping. Mastering design research will help designers to become more strategic in their work.

About the presenters

Irven Hope

Transitioning Africa’s workforce into the 4th industrial revolution

The mission of the Skill Exchange Makerspace is to demonstrate how outskirt regions can create competitive global economies by developing the innate talents of local communities.

Irven on LinkedIn

Asia Issa Sultan

Bed nets or Fishing nets? Social Impact Analysis De-mystified

Measuring social impact is a lot harder than quantifying your financial bottom line. This lightning talk will explore different ways to analyse social impact.

Asia on LinkedIn

David du Plessis

Lightning workshop: Mental model mapping

Mental model mapping is a deceptively simple tool that is essential for anyone working to change complex systems by providing a firm basis for decision making. Find out how in this workshop.

David on LinkedIn

Africa Design Lab 1

By on 11th October 2018

Launch, 12 April 2018

Vision

We are facing exponential change and tough problems. Africa needs people that can adapt, empathise, collaborate, and innovate. The Africa Design Lab meets this needs by teaching the skills of creative problem solving, collaboration, and making in hands-on interactive workshops.

The motivation was to create a Meetup where likeminded designers could explore how to bring human centred design to health-care, education, government services, mobility, financial services, AI, agriculture, and Open Data.

The reasoning is that the role of design is changing, and as designers we are increasingly called into conversations in industries where we’ve not been before. To remain relevant we need to evolve our thinking and the application of our methods by actively collaborating across industries.

Founding principles

Community

Knowledge and capability building via meetups, retreats, tutorials, talks, white papers, and workshops.

Collaboration

Establish relationships with entrepreneurs, academia, and social enterprises to increase the scope and reach of design in adjacent industries.

Experimentation

Design thinking is a solution based problem solving method with a bias towards taking action. It requires a distinct set of mindsets, process, and tools. The lab coaches these skills by running experiments in the real world.

About the presenters

Inez Patel

Inez is an independent UX designer, the director of Ladies that UX Johannesburg and co-organiser for The GoodWork Society. She is passionate about building valuable and sustainable communities. Inez started Ladies that UX JHB in August 2015 using a design-thinking approach and will be sharing some of her learnings and insights from this process.

Kate van Niekerk

Kate is a UX designer and content strategist with a background in anthropology and a passion for understanding humans and how they make decisions. She is particularly interested in inclusive design and using UX for positive social change.

The UX of Agriculture

By on 23rd May 2017

At the UX South Africa conference in Johannesburg I presented a talk on the UX of Agriculture. I’m interested in the future of food production, urban farming, and how digital technology can play a part in disrupting aspects of mass agriculture. This talk is the outcome of researching new developments and thinking in agritech and urban farming.

I originally studied biochemistry, genetics, and plant physiology, with a little bit of aquaculture, and lately I’m seeing opportunities to combine my interests in science and design. I’m also interested in the future of work debate, and as work gets automated the question becomes: What is meaningful work for humans to do?

For me, the future of food production and how we live in cities is part of the answer.

View my slides here:

[slideshare id=76199937&doc=uxofagriculture-170522081129]

The human hand in the manufacture of high-tech products

By on 10th April 2017

I enjoyed Isabel Mager’s talk at the Design Indaba 2017 festival, she investigated the role of human labour in the manufacture of high-tech products. A discussion sorely lacking in the design community. Check out her film, 5000times:

5000times _ manual tasks from Isabel Mager on Vimeo.

Our smart high-tech devices are made by human hand. How often though do we realise – as we sit swiping – that somewhere, someone is testing the image quality of such devices by doing nothing else than taking thousands of selfies each day? 5000times investigates the extensive, repetitive and even absurd human labour that is essential to the creation of our smart devices. Kapton tape, which is used along assembly lines for electronics, acts as narrative evidence of the human trace within.

Humans are the most adaptable machines and the idea of a total automated production process remains fictive; development, purchase and maintenance of machinery are far more expensive and complex than human labour.

Revisiting Lean and Agile

By on 10th April 2017

I discovered my notes from The Machine That Changed The World. It made me think about about the differences between Lean and Agile. A good place to start is to think about the different ways we make things.

Lean came first to address waste in manufacturing, Agile came later as a response to managing complexity of software development. From the Agile Insights Blog:

Conceptually Agile is a subset of Lean principles and practices which are in turn a subset of Systems Thinking.

Once an organisations starts running Lean or Agile principles the whole nature of the organisation starts changing from a static hierarchy to a fluid learning culture. Not all organisations are ready for it, and implementing it in practice can be hard because the consequences of implementing Lean or Agile threatens existing functions and job roles.

Read more on the differences between Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Scrum.