Ep.12 Appropriation to appreciate | Batsirai Madzonga

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you never know quite when you're gonna go live

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if you stream on youtube let me share this as well you never know

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quite when you're gonna go live

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there you go just as i was saying you never know quite when you're gonna go live that's it so what we have here

Introduction

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that's right matzonga thank you for joining me thank you man we've just had a good 15

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or 20 minute chat in fact before we started we've gone live thanks for you're you're in wat

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right that is correct in the uae beautiful weather right now this time of year

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what you doing out there i i live next to the beach so it's it's like

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the time of the year to go to the beach so hopefully after this we'll be hitting the sand

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oh wow wow good life so that's um that's an aspirational thing

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for for a lot of designers i'm sure you can hit the beach after you're done with your calls

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exactly so so how did you uh sorry i was gonna say hit the beach

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while you can because it gets really hot as everyone knows so we have only maybe five four five months out of the year

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to to go outside and do anything so make hayward sunshine

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um so it gets it gets too hot in the sense of

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uh like you can't even hide under the shade and be beyond the beach no you can cook

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a steak in the shade oh

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when you hear that it's getting gets extremely hot you assume the worst so when you eventually experience it

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it's not as bad as because you you really you really expect the worst

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that's what happened to me when i moved here everyone tells you like it's going to be super super hot so you really expect like super hot

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but when you get here and everything's air conditioned and you're not really outside anyway it's

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not that bad yeah how did you end up

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end up in dubai then and your your story

How did you end up in Dubai?

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sure so most of my life i lived in in zimbabwe harare

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after graduating i went back there and started a design studio

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did that for five years then ended up moving to south africa when when i got married

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to start our life there and two years into south africa i managed to land a

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job in dubai so through a recruitment agency she uh i actually met the lady

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when i first moved to south africa because i was looking for something to do and so like a couple years later she

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gets me up and says opportunity in dubai would you be interested and i've always wanted to

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work overseas so i said yeah let's do it and manage to get it and moved

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hmm man wow and so take me back to

What was it like in Zimbabwe?

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where it started in zimbabwe you said you started with um uh five years of your own agency

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how did that come about and what was the work like what were you doing

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cool yeah it's actually an interesting time in in history for zim in general so i studied computer

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science um at university of cape town so i graduated

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in 2007 and i moved back to harare 2008. and 2008 is when like

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hyperinflation was what was hitting like zimbabwe really hard

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i don't know if you've heard the stories but it was pretty bad and that's when we kind of switched to

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the dollarized system where in order to survive um as a business we

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had to build our clients in us dollars instead of local currency so that's what really helped us grow in

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terms of how it started um a childhood friend of mine introduced me to

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a friend of his because he said hey let's see this guy likes computers you like computers i think you might get

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along like verbatim that's literally what he said he likes computers you like computers i

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think you'll get along met the guy and he was very

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enterprising he was also from kind of a technical background with code

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um he was basically like me in in that he he had a technical understanding and aptitude

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and a passion for code but he was also a designer and a passion for the creative side

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so i think meeting you know how we're when you're a designer who can code and design they call you a unicorn so

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you can imagine meeting another unicorn it's like a once in a lifetime thing um

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so we we hit it off and he happened to be planning on starting a um uh he to do

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his own thing so i i joined him in that endeavor um we

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worked from um my dad gave us a room to use at our house so that was our first office but he told

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us you're um you're here but i'm only giving you like i think it was six months three or

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six months if you if you guys don't make enough revenue to to have your own office

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then my son do something else so we hit the ball running

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started meeting clients bringing them to the house um doing work it was great good enough that

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we actually did manage to move out and rent an office in town a couple

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months later we got our personal assistants to handle the admin we focus on growing the business

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five years later um we're still at it and it was an amazing time because when you're working for yourself

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um it really gives you time to learn a whole breadth of of skill sets so i had to learn 3d i had

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to learn [Music] codes codes had to learn animation how to learn design and different aspects of design

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um and this is all in the context of again hyperinflation now how did the

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context of hyperinflation uh influence your uh your choices as a designer or maybe

How did hyperinflation affect you as a designer?

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your taste your aesthetic as a designer so i think my my aesthetic as a designer

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was always benchmark on base marked on global kind of standards

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which is what i think set us apart as as a design studio because a lot of the work that was and

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maybe in some ways still is being done in zimbabwe is isn't held up to a higher standard

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so it's it's almost like where clients don't expect anything more than

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quote unquote mediocrity so that's what they're given it's changing that i see it actually changing now when i look at

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some of the designers in zim and their portfolios but you when you kind of rewind 10 years ago

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when we were starting out in 2008 it wasn't as as the quality of work being done wasn't

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that great also in the context of hyperinflation a lot of people had to subsidize

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their income and salaries by doing side hustles which manifested in a lot of people

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starting businesses and needing logos websites business cards etc

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so that's really where we came in and provided them a design solution that was cost

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effective really really high quality and kind of geared for

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for this um the startup community because people had to subsidize their income by starting businesses

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so a lot of our client base um probably 90 percent for the first four three four years

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where just ordinary people who needed to start businesses in order to survive

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and it was quite quite fulfilling to actually be able to to equip um people to

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to pursue other other areas that would give their family uh income to survive

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so this is quite fulfilling work involved so i've seen a piece at the design

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museum i think in london that actually has the zimbabwean currency and it's one of those there's very well

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known posters i believe yeah um is there has there already

Nostalgia & creativity

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passed enough time that people are feeling a sort of nostalgia for the times before or for the or utilizing that

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in kind of the creative outputs in some ways no because unfortunately zim is it's in

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a place where we're actually going back to 28 uh 2008 days where things are really

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bad and you're just trying to survive you know um so it's it's it's

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it's in that place right now where people again have to go back to having something beside your salary to

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survive so it's yeah i think it's it's it's it

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gets far removed from the realm of nostalgia when you're still living in that reality

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there's there's no entity for you to say oh you remember the days when hype inflation 2008

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when you're actually living in might not be hyperinflation but it's it is still quite um extreme inflation and

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yeah like people are just trying to survive

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is there how are designers reacting to it and how are they responding uh through

How are designers responding in Zimbabwe?

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what they're doing and are they trying to help people or in what ways they can

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i feel i feel that would be an accurate way of putting it creative people have always had that

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ability to empower other people through our work so i feel like that's definitely still

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um going on so the creative community is still and i've seen some really amazing work actually coming out of zim now

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um and yeah it's the future is looking bright for for designing them yeah i've seen

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a lot happening and a lot of the exciting designers coming from zoom actually

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these days exactly good yeah um and then yourself you've you've er

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straight flown the nest and uh you're abroad so

How is work abroad affecting your world view?

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how how is that work abroad kind of uh impacting your your world view

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your life view that's a good question um i think i think i'm in a place where

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i'm fortunate enough to be experiencing things as they happen so a lot of um what's happening in the

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world right now is in kind of the space of digital transformation and i'm blessed enough to be in a

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country that's at the forefront of some of that innovation from a digital point of view and that

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actually allows me to use that experience and to talk to

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people back home and actually expose them to some of the things that are happening

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so things that i i now realize that i take for granted are things that are years away from from

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happening in in zim for for some of the reasons that we've spoken about where they're in survival

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mode not really looking at putting putting resources

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towards innovation they're just in survival mode so even businesses there mean sure their digital transformation

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will as a necessity has to happen in order for for the companies there to survive but

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it's certainly not a topic of conversation from what i've noticed so even designers

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who they still i was chatting to a designer actually last month and he was saying in their

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strategy meetings with marketing they still talk about printing flyers and handing them out at traffic lights

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right and you don't see that anywhere here it's it's all everything is all digital right your

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all your marketing spend is digital but in their world their marketing spend

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is printing on flies handing them out at traffic lights that's their strategy

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oh sorry i was just going to say other ways from what you're seeing and the things

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that you're passing on what are the highlights and what are the things that the businesses perhaps

What are things businesses in Zimbabwe can look at?

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even though they're struggling day-to-day and even though they're still handing out flyers are there things they sh they need to be

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looking at even though it seems perhaps out of context for their situation right now

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so i think i think it boils down to to to to moving with the times because

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social media and and the digital space is very much alive in zimbabwe um for instance people there are very

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big on platforms like twitter obviously facebook um and i'm not sure how

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how much businesses are actually leveraging um those platforms because you still see

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like people in in marketing as far as i understand anyway um leveraging heavily on on traditional

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media not really digital media and i'm not sure why that is because some of the people that are in these

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marketing departments are quite young um then they should be kind of switched on to

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um the cost of not only the the cost effectiveness of advertising digitally but the

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effectiveness of it as well um so i i honestly don't know why

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that change or that shift the paradigm shift hasn't happened yet uh completely is there is there

Ideas & organizational hierachy

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maybe something about the hierarchy and the way that ideas get presented within the system

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to uh higher ups and then coming back to actually making

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those changes right if we've printed a thousand flyers every time

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then why shouldn't we this time i think you're you're absolutely right

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so it is an organizational change that has to happen from the top down

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um i mean you can try to implement change from the bottom up but if

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if the top doesn't agree nothing's going to change

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and so you've also you've also spent time in cape town right and i studied in africa yes

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uh and what did south africa teach you i think south africa really opened the

What did South Afrika teach you?

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the door to the world for me because for for the first time um

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i was in a in a in an environment where digital came first so my first job

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in south africa was actually at a purely digital agency like 90 of their output was digital

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and that really really helped me shift my mindset from saying i'm really good at designing

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logos and business cards to i now know how how to design an effective

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google display network banner for example so it was really a an intro into what would now become my

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uh my career going forward which is digital

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um and and now your career you're doing what what sort of kind of things

What are you working on?

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can you tell us about that you're working on sure or you have work done recently yeah

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so it's it's mostly again it's mostly digital so websites apps and software platforms

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um i was just working at emirates mbd which is a one of the biggest banking groups in the

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uae i was the design system lead there so with the work there involved working

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on their internal uh platforms as well as their retail

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banking solutions like your internet banking and the mobile app so that was really cool to work in a

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large organization that really and truly put the yield first i think they're probably the most

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digitally mature organization in the middle east because some of the things they do

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other companies even in the uk like we're chatting to a vendor from the uk and some of the

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things we're doing with design tokens and development they

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reference as being utopic and not realistic but they didn't realize this is stuff we

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do every day at the bank um so even some some institutions in europe are are behind

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as far as implementing um development and devops practices design ops practices

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the way msnbc was doing so it was really good time for me to be in that

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place where your your innovation is encouraged and supported like we're

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talking about top down bottom up from the ceo going down everyone was on the same

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bandwagon so you could make suggestions um for innovation you could make um um suggestions based on what

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what the the rest of the world was doing and it was received with open arms because everyone wanted to innovate

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and be the best so taking that experience through you you actually find that my experience

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at the bank in financial services becomes like a niche because you now get

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sought after for that particular bit of experience in financial services digital product

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design and so i'm going to jump across as well and share my

Sankofa typeface & design systems

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screen because i'm excited to have you on as well because of sankofa

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so this was shared by yourself i believe on a whatsapp groups or

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uh paddy probably whatsapp group and and i jumped on the opportunity to

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try it out and we think yeah and we we really felt like

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it felt right at the time to to use the and we're going to be using it as the

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theme font for nairobi designer 2021 for the words

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together so people will be seeing that all over our feed etc

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uh so even though you're based abroad and you have been for a while you're

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still active in the african design scene and you're still keeping up to date

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and and creating projects such as this one so how did sankofa come about

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cool yeah so sankofa i think it's it's a it's really a combination of of of a lot

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of things so the i would say the seeds started when i met sakima from deepwater

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uh because i lectured at his uh at his um institution ziva in in zimbabwe for

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for a couple of years and when i watched his ted talk on typography and i mean he is globally

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well known for this topic in particular it opened my eyes to

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the fact that as designers who are trained in in obviously design

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we're not really exposed to other it writing systems or

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um or the history of design in in other cultures because most of our curriculum most of

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our studies are based on american and european kind of authors and

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material and and uh curriculums um so to to to watch saki's talk when we

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speaks of the writing systems from africa being much older uh than even writing systems in in

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places like uh babylon for instance it was it was quite eye-opening so i would say that's

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that's why it started as a seed um because in his ted talk he actually speaks of the

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um sankofa uh writing uh kind of um system from ghana which is where

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um he gave a whole presentation on the symbols that were created there so sankofa um just for everyone's uh

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from from a context point of view um is is a it's a is a writing system

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uh it's a glyph in in a writing system from uh from ghana and sankofa means to

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to learn from the past and to return and get it so return to your roots learn from the past

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and it it felt like it made sense um years later when i was looking um

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working at emits mbd now and because it's it's a banking group based in the

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middle east uh there's certain things that we're we're starting to look at like how do we

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appropriate culture in a way that's bespoke to our users like talking about

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that user-centered design approach um and how do we represent certain

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things like for example a home icon um the way a home icon is is represented

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online right now is typically um it's typically just a

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house right western design a house with an angled roof that's a home icon but when you look at

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houses in in morocco or houses in south africa or houses even in the

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middle east itself that the architecture doesn't lend itself um to align with that kind of home icon

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so i was just thinking to myself one day like how if you were to use uh design systems which i was doing at

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the time um how would you use design systems to create to to reappropriate your digital

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products from a cultural perspective and that's kind of where sankofa came because i'm

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african uh i grew up in africa lived most of my life in africa it seemed like a logical starting point

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um to to to kind of experiment with that notion of how if

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you were to culturally appropriate things like typography and iconography

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uh even color palettes how would you do it so i started researching on on african design african

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uh writing systems etc and sankofa was born

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thank you so these design systems so there's a many questions i

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have but as we're talking about design systems and uh these

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houses and these icon sets um is there how perhaps could you

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tell me through like the process of designing one of these these icons and adjusting it

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uh for to suit the style and the houses right you picked up on

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the houses for example yeah and how those are different

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did you talk about that yeah so so i think it these were all really based on my my own

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personal life experience and the reason that the real reason i actually created the sankofa project

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is to try and empower designers from all over the world not just african designers but

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empower designers to look at the way things are done and try and look at it from the perspective of your

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own life experience your own cultural history and where you're from so to

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create these icons i really just drew from my own experience so growing up we used to um where my my

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grandparents lived uh was in the rural areas and the architecture basically looks like

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um the top left uh the top right corner that house icon there

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um which which i think they call them rendezvous houses it's it's a round um structure made of

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clay and um mud and the frame is made using like uh

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branches of wood um etc and in the how the roofs are made using grass

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just like really traditional architecture and it's very uh similar in structure to how

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traditionally houses in salafi were created for example using that rendezvous design

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so a lot of these are are basically based on my own life experience

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and a lot of them because i had to kind of fill in the blanks because obviously a settings icon

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there's no real world um counterparts to a settings icon so

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some of them some of them will look similar to

Skip - Technical difficulties

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man sorry my internet's gone uh i'm just resetting the router it popped up with the red light i'll be

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back on hopefully in a minute

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hold on i don't know hey we're back oh

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we're good okay and it looks like we're still still live or not yes we are

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oh because i was online it stayed online

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in that case i think we're good i'm on my phone now so okay

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just give me five to seven five seconds

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hopefully does the mic work i can hear you

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[Music]

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okay

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4g so you just uh you were telling me about

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thank offer and how it all began yes um so so just to kind of recap on on

Sankofa typeface & design systems continued...

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that uh i was talking about um how i first the seed was first

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sewn by sakima from deepwater by when i watched his ted talk and when i

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was now working in the uae and we're having discussions as a design

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team on [Music] cultural appropriation um because we're

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we're middle eastern uh we were a middle eastern company hello

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i'm not working anymore that's why i'm speaking in past tense um so yeah we're middle eastern company

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and we were designing our icons internally and when we got got to the home icon i

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i started to to see how it's we've been doing the home icon

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the same way for ever since i started right digital design like 2008

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it's always been the exact same icon and i was starting to question um now that i was in design systems and

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seeing how design systems were used to scale design

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are we able to use design systems to create culturally inclusive design so

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depending on where your users are could you change your home icon for example to something other than what

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they traditionally used to see and it'll still make sense to them because it's

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it's a home icon that's based on that particular culture's

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idea of what a house or home looks like so i started asking these questions and

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because i'm african the first experience i would obviously

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draw from is my experience growing up in africa and what things like

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home or financing or banking or archiving in other words storing storage how

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how did that stuff look like when i was growing up and that's how the icon set came to be

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and what what sort of uh challenges have you faced as

Challenges in presenting your culture to others

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as an african designer as an african creative or just as an african uh in going into new cultures and

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presenting your own culture and making sure that your viewpoints are represented yeah that's an interesting

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question so i would say none because as as an industry where we're

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really we really draw from like international standards

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and international trends so as an being an african designer

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designing in dubai there's not much quote-unquote african

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inspiration i can draw from because we're not necessarily designing for africa we're designing uh it's even worse in dubai because

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ninety percent of of the populace is expatriates so you're looking at people people from

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over 120 countries living in dubai and that's what you're designing for so

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you you really do have to be inclusive um you have to be i don't i wouldn't say

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generic but in a certain way um you you have to be true to your company's brand

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but also not too culturally specific because you're tailoring um you're catering for a

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customer base that's that has over 120 countries right so if my experience being an african

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designer uh doesn't really contribute to my experience here because

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we're we're designing based on international trends uh international best practices

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and best-in-class approaches um so yeah i wouldn't say it's it affected much

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so what about that kind of shared experience of so many nations in one under one country under one label

Commonalities between UAE and Afrika?

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um what have you learned maybe picked up or seen as commonalities between the

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emirates and between africa yeah i think i think the most common

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element is we all look up to the same uh look up to the same kind of design

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gods if i'm to put it that way so a client brief in south africa will say and i've literally heard this

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or i've had this experience we want a website that looks like apple right that's a south african client

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you're in dubai same narrative we want a website that looks like apple so we're all kind of we all have the

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same north star when it comes to design so it's it's when you put designers in a

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room that come from like five different countries as in as well as in our case uh even more than

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five in some cases we all have the same north star so it's really easy to align on aesthetics

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and ways of working and etc because we're all kind of striving to to be the best

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in the way that the world currently views the best as being whether it's apple

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whether it's google's material design uh whatever it is we're all striving

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to kind of be the best in that framework so we all kind of aligned on on how to

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approach our design practice so it's quite reflective that even though i'm a designer from

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zimbabwe i can meet a designer from italy who's like first language is it to me but

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we're speaking the same language from a design point of view [Music]

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um the i just realized i'm not sure if this is recording

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but i will be on well it will be on the livestream anyway

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so uh it's interesting you bring you bring up

Standardized Vs. Nonstandardized design

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apple got brought up a lot of course and we all grew up looking up to them

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for for many good reasons i guess and we've kind of grown up perhaps i always

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looked up to minimal design and the minimal aesthetic and aspired to that and we kind of grew

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up in this period when design was trying to almost standardize itself

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and now now we've managed to do that and every website looks the same and and now

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we're kind of in this maybe i don't know if we're in this moment where or just before this moment but

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where people are trying to differentiate themselves right it's almost like you spend your

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childhood i've heard that as well you spend your childhood uh trying to be the same as everyone else

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and try to spend your adult years trying to be different to everyone else right yeah that's absolutely right

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that's part of the reason sankofa came to be because i i i started writing articles on medium

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and i was looking for topics to write on and one of the topics that i thought of was

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how do we what is the what is the current state of our digital landscape versus

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the state of our physical landscape

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to to write that article i i started looking at images of cultures from around the world so

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it's all really and if you look at like cultures in china japan india africa

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you name it even even russia with the way the architecture and the colors um kind of come

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come through there in the textures it's all really colorful it's all really vibrant you can tell

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indian architecture next to russian you can tell the difference right from the get-go there's no

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commonality at all but when you look at an indian website in the russian website

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that falls through so i started to think why why is that and that's that's again where some

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coffee came through where i was saying a designer in india is looking at apple as

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this is the the the epitome of web design and russia design and russia is doing

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the exact same thing so we end up in a place where minimalism less is more

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white space all of those terms end up kind of directing us towards a design

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language that's exactly the same across the world and it has it has its merits it has it's

39:14

it's good and it's bad but i think to to your point it's it's ending up

39:20

um to in a place where our digital world isn't really representative of of our

39:26

physical world and i feel like we're we're losing a lot from that perspective

39:31

um yeah it's that homogenization of of these aesthetics and it's

39:38

also interesting i remember perhaps you'd like you gave the example of india you'd

39:44

go to like a shop in india and you'd see like a crazy designed poster right um or in africa somewhere or

39:53

wherever really and that that that design aesthetic um is honest at least in

40:01

in the sense that it is actually trying to communicate what the people are presenting

40:08

and even though all the fonts may be different and there may be too many

40:13

there may be so many rules design rules broken so now now if you if they give you

40:21

just a white leaflet that looks like kfc from the same restaurant uh you you might not actually be as

40:27

excited to eat there right because they're not trying to do do their own thing

40:33

exactly i i like how you put in the the authenticity angle because it really is

Design authenticity

40:39

how do you become more authentic in your in your kind of approach to

40:45

design and it's very difficult when you're designing it for in that when i was presenting the sankofa

40:51

project to various creatives one of the one question came up

40:57

started to come up a lot which was how do you reconcile

41:02

creating culturally inclusive design with the the personality of the brand like how do

41:09

you how do you not lose the brand um when you're trying to culturally

41:15

appropriate that brand across various cultures digitally across the world

41:20

and i think to answer that my question my answer was you you don't

41:26

need to lose your brand in the midst of that exercise because it's really about

41:32

the nuance of of your design not not changing the entire design in this totality

41:38

but seeing where you can get the most bang for your buck where you can change small things like

41:44

your illustrations your um your illustration color palettes not your primary brand color palettes

41:50

your icon sets what can you do there uh the meaning of color in your digital products

41:56

um and and one designer actually pointed this out where they were rolling out the japanese

42:04

um digital products in europe and there's certain things that they had

42:09

to change because in europe x did not mean x x wide

42:15

so they had to change the way they dealt with color in in some cases um typography as well see it actually

42:23

started a conversation that i felt was worth having um right now where how how do we become as

42:29

as we homogenize our design how do we shift to now being more culturally inclusive

42:35

and not lose our our real world heritage on the digital landscape

42:43

are there any things you've learned particularly uh in where you've been working recently

Influencial Afrikan role models in breaking down cultural barriers

42:50

or other people that you've learned from who have really made an impact in the way that they allow you to look at a culture

42:58

and kind of breakthrough break through ways yeah so so i think i think psyche will

43:04

probably be number one on that list given thou he's been unapologetically african in everything he does

43:12

and i think it's quite refreshing to to have that and there are a lot of actually designers

43:17

who african designers who are unapologetic in their in their heritage and they they bring

43:24

out the african in in the things they do and i think i feel that's something that should be

43:29

celebrated across the world yeah thank you very much so he he gave a

43:37

talk this week at a world-class designers conference did you manage to catch any of that

43:43

no i didn't unfortunately it was amazing it was really good really well put

43:48

together and uh goes back to what we were talking

43:53

about i think before we started recording and streaming that uh you know

43:58

it was organized with africa largely in mind and

44:04

it's it's important to say that um you you can have a focus on africa

44:11

and african design without talking about it specifically in

44:16

in the name but also uh the these people putting it together um

44:23

can be world-class designers and now we're seeing more world-class designers coming through from africa absolutely

44:31

yeah and simon simon charway was there as well uh he talked about

44:38

uh design and culture and now it's popped out in my head what his talk was called but it was

44:45

uh he he talks about the one slide really made an impact on me

44:51

where you talked about how how

44:58

no culture has the right to enforce a design aesthetic or a design sensibility on any

45:05

other culture and it kind of reminded me of what we're

45:10

just talking about really on how these it's almost

45:15

it's very difficult to distinguish where one culture starts and another end right now anyway but it's definitely

45:21

possible to kind of track back and look at look at history and learn from history

45:27

um and and also now to be seeing so much expression from many

45:33

places of the world that the creative industries in more established markets

45:38

are really just trying to grab onto their amazing creative and trying to harness it within their

45:45

own uh plans right yeah definitely

45:51

yeah so have you have you got any other african

45:59

teachers or mentors or people within the creative sphere or just more broadly that you've learned

46:06

from from from a creative point of view

46:13

i actually can't think of anything top of my head um because saki has been such a such a

46:18

pivotal he might not know this because i haven't told him that he's pivotal for me

46:24

but he he is uh and and i think i'm here for many yeah for sure for sure

46:31

and um i can't remember his name but there's a an architect as well i watched it to

46:37

talk on um and he he also opened my eyes to the fact that

46:43

the world of architecture kind of suffers from the same thing where it's when you go to like he went

46:50

to school in the in the states um and when you learn architecture from from a western and

46:57

european perspective um you you the danger is you take that

47:03

into your your profession right same way designers are less is more oriented

47:08

and minimalist oriented uh and what he's done is the flip side of that where he's gone back home

47:15

and he's he's um developing ways of building and architecture that

47:20

are applicable to the people that are in in his um in his ecosystem and where he

47:27

lives um it's quite interesting uh i'll share with you the ted talk um i'm talking about so you

47:34

can kind of get more perspective on on what i mean but it's it's amazing how he's taken his

47:40

classical education and flipped that on its head to be able

47:45

to innovate in in africa when it comes to building materials the actual design of the buildings uh

47:53

and ways of building as well it's quite interesting are there things you've experienced

Have any of you mindsets changes since Zimbabwe?

47:59

uh that maybe would surprise you if you heard your if you saw yourself 10 years ago

48:07

whether things you've worked on or things you've experienced or just mindsets that have changed

48:15

i think i think the world has changed a lot since i started 10 years ago because i i wasn't

48:21

necessarily planning on becoming a user experience designer

48:28

in many ways i was didn't even really know what that was until i started doing it but i i feel

48:35

like it's just being a designer in in in the digital space

48:41

um is really where where people need to be because when i speak to designers back home in

48:48

in zim very or some of them don't really know the career paths that are available on

48:54

the digital space and it's a shame because by the time

48:59

those people graduate and have a little bit of work experience ai and automation would have taken over

49:07

um it's a lot of the mundane tasks that they're trying to perfect right now

49:14

so it's almost like you're you're learning a skill that's not going to be needed five years from now

49:19

um because it's it's really shifting towards designers being problem solvers not designers being rolling out uh

49:27

content because machine learning can can do that for us so how are you prepping them as a

How are you preparing for the future?

49:35

designer for for what's coming you know the the revolution that's

49:40

coming in front of us yeah that's a great question so so i feel like

49:46

being techno having some kind of tech savvy helps so i get asked this question a lot

49:53

from from young designers like because i have a development background

49:59

they always ask me so i have no idea how to code do i need to learn how to code because i

50:04

don't know the first thing about math and code i'm a creative um but what i always tell them is you

50:11

you don't need to code but you need to at least have an appreciation of how the technical aspect affects what

50:19

you do and how what you do affects the technical aspect because when machine learning comes into

50:26

play you're going to need to understand um how these systems at least understand

50:33

how they work so you can better strategize and implement in your when you're having your creative meetings

50:40

uh in huddles how you can best leverage that technology to get ahead because the team design teams that are

50:46

really going to be able to leverage that technology are going to leapfrog over designers

50:53

that don't what about no code tools have you come up have you been using any or come

50:59

across any no code tools again no code tools so you get to build stuff without

Skip - Technical difficulties

51:06

coding like drag and drop sort of things yeah like sigma yeah yeah definitely so so

51:14

what i'm actually more more interested in is how those platforms are gonna be five

51:20

or three or five years from now when the no code aspect really becomes mainstream because

51:27

i don't feel like right now

51:32

i don't feel like right now the the no code aspect is is very mainstream um so when you say

51:39

no code you mean how how design is automated right from from design to to to a finished product

51:46

without having to code

53:27

you

54:01

man sorry about this uh can you hear me now yes i can hear you

54:07

now oh well good so uh i'm back i'm back thank you uh so

54:14

no code tools uh you were just about to start telling me about that

Automated design tools

54:20

yeah so when you say no code no code tools um can you kind of elaborate on what you

54:26

mean sure so it's things that allow you to build a website for example without any clicks just like

54:34

yeah like wix like squarespace things like i don't know if you've heard of bubble or asana

54:41

um etc etc glide apps yeah yeah

54:48

so so two things to to kind of touch on there so the first thing is no code tools are

54:54

very real and i feel like sometimes designers

54:59

um especially back home where i'm from aren't aren't really cleaned up on how that

55:07

really affects them because a lot of them focus uh are focusing on for example

55:14

when you're freelancing as a designer you are you're creating websites and

55:19

you're designing logos that's like i would say that's where the bulk of your work comes from where

55:26

clients a logo or a client wants a website and the problem is those both of those

55:32

things are now freely available online without any skill needed whatsoever

55:39

so it's it's eroding like back when i was doing websites you could charge a thousand five hundred dollars for a

55:45

website easy because no code tool didn't exist now a client comes and you can't really charge

55:51

the corporate for a corporate website the same amount because you can go on wix and do it

55:56

in a few minutes and without being a designer without being anything because it has templates there ready for

56:02

you so for people to realize that they need to shift their focus on okay

56:09

so a client needs a website how do i add value that wix or no code tools don't give

56:16

that client and i feel like that's that's where the focus needs to be even if it's a brand design uh because you can you

56:24

get those logo generators online right and most often they're not they're good

56:29

enough what the client needs because they're not trying to be a global brand they just need to sell chickens to a

56:35

supermarket so they just need a basic logo so you don't need a brand strategy and all that

56:42

when when a client just wants a 20 logo um so it starts to erode a lot of the

56:47

value that designers used to have and coming back to user experience

56:54

design how a no code tool is going to affect us and i was watching uh

57:01

a talk given by this guy called benjamin wilkins who at the time of the talk i think it

57:07

was about three years ago he was at airbnb and he gave a demo

57:14

on how by by leveraging their mature design system and the way they built their components

57:20

they could sketch on a whiteboard during their uh brainstorm sessions you could just sketch on a

57:26

board and by having your your your machine learning algorithm

57:31

connected to a camera and object recognition it could pick out the elements you're drawing

57:38

and um map it to an existing component in their design system

57:44

ah so it is quite amazing to see that live where it's a whiteboard session they're

57:50

drawing stuff in in designing kind of their wi-frames and discussing design solutions and the

57:56

system is actually real-time building um building their components or building

58:02

the the solution using their built components it is quite amazing and what that showed me is in in the

58:09

same way that uh this traditional design has been commoditized we're kind of going to a place where

58:16

user exp or ui design as they call it right because there's always this duality of ui and ux

58:23

the ui part of it is becoming really really mundane as as even today when i design

58:29

ui isn't really a key focus because a lot of our clients have mature design

58:35

systems so as a ui designer your job is just to make sure

58:40

it's not perfect it's not really to innovate in as far as how the actual product ends

58:46

up looking it's more about the experience of using the product then how the product looks exactly

58:53

it's no longer like oh where does this button go because there's kind of that system is within ios or

58:59

within android as well right and so i guess i i had a couple of questions that came up

59:06

firstly as we're talking about these no code tools and we're praising them for the ability to give anyone

59:13

for again democracizing design and now looking back at what we were saying about every design looking generic

59:21

and now when you go in if everyone's using squarespace for their portfolio then everyone's portfolio looks the same

59:28

right as an example but i think that's designer's fault because there is a

59:34

designer who's creating templates for squarespace in four weeks

59:39

so nothing stops wix from creating a wix africa.wix where this

59:47

on africa.wigs is geared towards that market right or japan whatever it is so it's

59:54

it's really the responsibility of the people designing these templates because i don't think it's machine learning

59:59

that's designing roots templates at the moment it's probably someone's on his computer

1:00:04

so those people or rather maybe maybe let's put it on wix they need to have a platform where

1:00:10

designers across the world can submit um themes that are culturally inclusive

1:00:16

or culturally contextually appropriate for for the environment they're living in

1:00:21

and maybe doing it that way would open it up to um to a lot more diverse kind of digital

Skip - Technical difficulties

1:00:40

sphere

1:01:08

um

1:02:18

this

1:02:47

you

1:05:18

hey man i'm still struggling i'm and i'm uh i don't know what's happening with

1:05:23

the network today oh it's such a great conversation i'm gonna keep trying but i also don't wanna

1:05:29

hog you for too long i was hoping we could kind of at least tie up if i managed to

1:05:35

uh let me just keep trying quickly

1:06:03

you

1:06:31

hello can you hear me yes i knew you oh man i just i came i

1:06:37

even managed to come back on and i could i could hear you playing my voicemail

1:06:44

right anyway i'm very sorry i have no idea

1:06:51

what's happening with with our network home and mobile today uh so i've been

1:06:59

really loving this conversation and i'm sure we could go on go on for ages but also maybe we can

1:07:06

come back to it once once we've recovered the network okay um yeah

1:07:13

yeah uh so were there other you know we've kind of

Advise to designers in Afrika & the future of design

1:07:18

been cut off a couple of times but were there other other stories um for this first time

1:07:24

that you really wanted to share and kind of any anecdotes that came to mind that you

1:07:30

you think would be useful for people to share yeah i think for for me the biggest

1:07:37

thing right now [Applause] um

1:07:43

is the the ability for for creatives to to really map out what

1:07:50

the future of their desired career path is going to be um

1:07:56

within the context of like the near future five or ten years because a lot of the

1:08:01

designers that are in school right now for example um in african design schools

1:08:07

i worry that they're not learning the right thing and they're not being exposed to the right thing

1:08:13

um because when you're now in in uh in in when you're now trying to to

1:08:19

get a job or when you're now trying to to freelance and design the world's going to be very different

1:08:25

to to what you're learning in school right now be it in in design school or wherever

1:08:31

you are in africa i feel like the conversations about especially around technology

1:08:36

that need to be had in order to to make sure that young design is equipped for what's coming

1:08:47

yeah i totally agree with that and even for ourselves as well there's kind of

1:08:53

going to be a time when people who feel young and feel and i

1:08:58

feel like they should be shouldn't be getting left behind are going to be getting left behind

1:09:04

right we have someone a friend of ours called

1:09:10

esther este uh she's done a lot of things and teachers as well and we always have

1:09:16

these conversations about the future of design and tech and looking really uh if truck drivers

1:09:22

and uber drivers are feeling threatened now um then canva

1:09:29

is is one step there and squarespace and then the next step in russia has already been taken because there

1:09:36

was an ai last year that fooled clients yeah yeah from our collaborative yeah

1:09:45

yeah i saw that and give that as a great example um as well like just to show like this

1:09:51

because people aren't aren't hearing these stories and they when they hear ai they think

1:09:57

we're we're far away from from that reality when in fact it's happening today

1:10:03

so really that designers need to develop what their skill set is and what they're

1:10:10

offering right and they still have a lot to offer but just have to bear in mind that it's

1:10:16

beyond the tools that you're using absolutely and i feel like it's

1:10:23

it's just about the example another example i was giving is

1:10:32

when you look at technologies that are being developed for example with elon musk's neural link

1:10:38

and how they're creating ways for human beings to interact with tech in ways

1:10:44

that aren't limited by our physical limitations um right because currently um our our

1:10:51

inputs in outputs with with technology is based on our fingers is based on on screens that we're seeing

1:10:58

and the information that's coming there and as designers we're currently

1:11:04

designing according to those limitations right so all our ux

1:11:09

best practices on accessibility typography colors use of all that stuff is based on

1:11:16

screens and how people interact with technology today so when when that no longer becomes an

1:11:23

issue ten years from now even five years from now when neurolink goes live with uh brain implants that

1:11:29

allow you to to stream spotify directly to your brain as an example

1:11:35

how do how does that affect designers working at spotify right when all their design systems

1:11:40

currently are tailored towards screens um so as designers we need to actually

1:11:46

see okay five you project yourself five ten years from now how do i pivot my understanding of

1:11:52

design how do i pivot uh like you're saying my skill sets how do i open my mind

1:11:58

to just even the possibility that the design practice can happen

1:12:03

on interfaces that are purely in someone's mind how does that even look like so we need

1:12:09

to start thinking like this if we're going to survive as designers

1:12:17

because it was really where the world

1:12:23

um the world's not going to change in that way because it's already happening and it needs to happen

1:12:28

for for the next frontier of our kind of development as a species is concerned

1:12:35

yeah and it's just that we've been developing so very quickly that we're really managing to keep up

1:12:41

with in this in the span of one human lifespan so much happens that it's it's really

1:12:48

i'm not surprised that our grand what what must our grandparents think right and

1:14:13

you

1:15:23

you

1:16:14

you