May 23, 2016
AfriDesignX, in partnership with Ashesi University, held a conference centered on the role of design and tech communities in sub-Saharan African, in designing the continent’s future. Under the theme “Design futures in Sub-Saharan Africa,” the conference drew a cross-section of students from tertiary institutions and professionals including user interface designers, architects, scientists and academicians from across Africa.
The session held at Ashesi’s campus, is the second in a series of six global AfriDesignX events examining the themes of design and technology. AfriDesignX is a network of designers, technological innovators and museum professionals from six different cities – Accra, Dakar, Nairobi, Cape Town, London and Oxford – working together for over two years to investigate new design typologies emerging from the African continent.
Opening the session Dr. Ayorkor Korsah, Department of Computer Science at Ashesi, spoke on Ashesi’s adoption of design as a core part of our curriculum. “Design and design thinking are important parts of what we try to do here,” she said. “So we’re really interested in how design feeds into technology, into entrepreneurship and how it feeds into the problem solving process in order to make the world a better place.”
The two-day event was spread between a symposium on the opening day and a design workshop and challenge to close the conference. Speakers at the symposium touched on design in architecture, photography, user experiences, education and in space exploration.
Speaking on human-focused design, Christian Benimana, a Kigali based architect working for the non-profit studio MASS, stressed on the importance of designing to improve communities and protect the environment. “We need to harness talent and skill that is uniquely African,” he said. “People have been building for thousands of years, but what we want to do is to build differently. We design our buildings to help liberate and empower people and also improve communities and protect the environment. We aim to create a generation of human-centered designers – a new generation of designers to build African cities.”
During the workshop, participants worked in teams to build solutions to address food security. Mentored by the facilitators, the groups built prototypes of mobile applications, robots, drones and blueprints for businesses to help address food security on the continent.
AfriDesignX sessions, while bringing a rich blend of talent together for days of symposiums and workshops, hope to identify innovative Africans and African solutions within the design space to help explore solutions to the continent’s problems.
“We are interested in who the designers and innovators leading digital craft on the continent are,” said Cher Potter, Project Lead and Organizer. “What are they working on, what kind of things are they making and how do these things address some of the biggest problems that the world faces today; things like inequality, the need for education and climate change? These are all the driving questions behind AfridesignX.”
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