Objects Telling Stories Digitally at Capetown’s Design Indaba

Cape Town’s Design Indaba took place last week, a yearly event that includes a conference featuring some of the world’s leading thinkers in design with an exhibition championing South African products, furniture architecture and fashion (amongst other disciplines) attracting visitors from across the globe.

One of the interesting trends from the conference was the rise of objects with detailed narratives connected to them. Just as furniture and products are able to tell visual stories (e.g. wood carvings) modern designers are using digital tools to add a storytelling layer to physical objects. The movement runs in parallel with a broader trend of location-based information kicked off by the likes of Google Maps and location based services on mobile phones.

A great example was the work of Revital Cohen, a graduate from the RCA in London, who showcased a conceptual biological clock for women (pictured above). The conceptual object spits out a white ball every so often based on data gathered from the owner’s analyst, banker and boss.

Another thought-provoking piece came from Canadian graduate of Eindhoven, Jon Stam. His Curiosity Cabinet (pictured below) contains a mixture of physical objects and virtual ones (RFID chips stored with digital information). He also exhibited a rug with cut outs of Canadian lakes on it that contained tiny audio devices playing clips of his family reading out letters/memories related to the places mapped on it – viewers must put their ear right up against it to activate and hear them.

Design Indaba 2009