Between 10and5 in conversation with Anja Venter of Hacking Design:
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...What has your research into the topic of design democratisation in the townships in and around Cape Town brought to light?
Saying “in and around townships” is a bit misleading – I might work with many people who come from ‘townships’ (a blanket term which I think is a bit problematic – but that’s a whole other story), but my focus was more on people who don’t have all the material and epistemological comforts of middle class. The research is about how people deal with inequality from an affordances perspective: A youngster from Gugulethu might not have access to art at school, or any creative mentors, or know anyone in the creative industry, or have uncapped wifi on his macbook pro, or use Adobe, or surf Behance. He might have an Android device, with ten different image editing apps, a folio paper, a whatsapp group and an idea. This kid will start a fashion brand, or run a selfie decoration micro-enterprise, using his phone for purposes never intended by the makers of the tech. People hustle hard, and they use what they have to make what they can. Mobile phones play an incredibly important role in learning, networking and creative practice when other resources are scarce. But the existing options for participation are still quite problematic: Universities are expensive to attend, are only accessible if you can speak English well enough and favour european design canons as the centres of design knowledge; apps negate intellectual property, have fixed aesthetics and aren’t fully functional for legitimate design practice; and access to online spaces are either curated (through initiatives such as internet.org) or incredibly constrained because of data costs.
What myself and my colleagues are trying to do is feed these existing ad hoc practices and usage ecologies, back into the technology design side. We try to challenge this from-the-west-to-the-rest model of technology appropriation, and make things that hack local resources.
These findings inform your thesis project “Hacking Design”, for which you’re looking towards building a mobile exclusive, open-source design tool for young South Africans interested in the creative industries. Where are you in this process?
It’s rude to ask a PhD student how far their thesis is – didn’t you know? Just kidding, I’m busy grappling through the thesis writing part. I did a lot of paper prototyping and we developed a first iteration of the app which was a complete disaster. But as soon as I’m done with the thesis and can negotiate IP, I’m hoping to continue development. Ideally, with the way that the adoption of smartphones is going right now, the sweet spot for release would be about two or three years from now.
My contribution, for now, is more of an approach to designing creative tech, than the actual development – which needs a whole team of people on board to realise. People who know a lot more about technical systems than I do, people who are able to build visualisation systems from scratch. I’ve had many incredible developers offer to help me, but we can’t really take it much further until I’m done with my part of the deal with Microsoft.
