Design Indaba

KARRI is a child-friendly voice messaging device that allows young users to communicate without relying on smartphones or screens, an alternative to early smartphone use. Design by Pentagram and developed in collaboration with technology company, KARRI, the device is aimed at children aged five to thirteen, to offer a safe, independent way to send and receive voice messages between children and parents through a dedicated system.

New York City’s Park Avenue Armory is host to an immersive, calming porcelain soundscape designed by French artist and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Titled ‘clinamen’, which refers to the unpredictable movement of atoms, brings a moment of calm to visitors amidst the cityscape. The installation comprises three circular basins, each spanning 40 feet in diameter and holding more than 10,000 gallons of water.

Wind to Watts, is designer Fabien Brun’s radical approach to decentralized energy infrastructure. The system is designed for off-grid and hard-to-reach environments where traditional wind turbines are impractical or impossible to install. The turbines employ a  modular construction approach and are built from lightweight aluminium tubes and recyclable plastic tarpaulins.

The 2026 Serpentine Pavilion (London) is built on a deceptively simple idea: a wall. Designed by Mexico City based practice LANZA Atelier and officially titled ‘a serpentine’, the pavilion is a refined take on the traditional English crinkle-crankle wall as a winding brick structure that snakes across Kensington Gardens. The wall though simple, creates a series of sheltered and open spaces for gathering, pause and meditation.

What if one of the most overlooked kitchen waste products could become a beautiful piece of contemporary design? Joanne Odisho, Australian designer, has turned humble kitchen waste into an award winning lighting design. Originally created during her studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, while exploring the materiality of food waste, Odisho found a way to turn discarded eggshells into a sculptural lighting object.

Massive Attack, known for embedding pro-justice commentary into their music and art, have transformed their concert stage into satirical take on surveillance technology. Designed for their latest run of shows, with creative collaborators United Visual artists (UVA), the stage visuals create the unsettling illusion that audience members are being watched, tracked and harvested by invisible systems.

What Have They Done with All the Air?, a stirring new exhibition by William Kentridge, features works that form part of his new theatre production in the making, in which the famous Johannesburg-based artist and Design Indaba alum uses the setting of a boat as a prompt for unpacking issues of power, colonialism and migration. The upcoming theatre production, The Great Yes, The Great No, employs the technique where actors perform against green screens so backgrounds can be added later.

Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa is turning discarded plastic into artistic tapestries designed to become a record of extraction. Takadiwa gathers plastic consumer waste from recycling centres and dumping sites across Harare, meticulously sorted by colours and textures and then arranged and drilled into a woven-like artwork that blur the boundaries between tapestry and sculpture.

At the Design Indaba’s 25th anniversary, South African musician, poet and cultural icon Sho Madjozi opened the conference with her undeniable creative energy and unapologetically African perspective. Delivering a part performance-part design talk,  Sho Madjozi shared how identity, heritage and popular culture can become powerful tools for creative expression and cultural representation.

The geospatial research studio Conflict Ecology, has developed a method of using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data to identify and map damage to buildings across conflict areas such as Lebanon, creating a detailed picture of the resulting impact that might otherwise remain unseen. visual record. Unlike conventional satellite imagery, which depends on weather conditions, daylight and clear visibility, radar actively sends signals towards the Earth and measures how those signals return.