Ask why – to champion your cause
Here at Potion we use design to inspire people to do things better, or to do better things. That’s our cause. A big part of our process of engagement when we take a design brief is to find out who you are, what you do, how you do it and, most importantly, why it matters. ...
Long live App Themes! (The custom web application is dead)
Yesterday’s news: “WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform, its also a very cool content management system”. Today, WordPress is being used, more and more, to drive serious web applications by using custom themes and plugins.
What does it mean to be a World Design Capital?
I spoke to Mike Purdham, a consultant to the city of Cape Town and working with Cape Town Partnership on World Design Capital 2014. He thinks that what World Design Capital means for Cape Town is to put design on the national agenda. “We can’t have a mindset of “working towards 2014”. I think the ...
The OS is Irrelevant
The good news is that the Operating System wars are dead. Long live HTML5 …and the browser wars. There was barely an audible buzz around this topic in the WordPress community last week at Wordcamp, Cape Town 2012. But earlier this year, at the Enterprise Mobility Forum 2012, I listened to a lineup of industry ...
Are township tours responsible?
Iain Harris, founder of Coffeebeans Routes, creators of travel experiences around the stories of Cape Town, told me that the key is in our language. He says “The thing about sustainability is, changing the language we use is also quite important. How is it that township tours can be branded as responsible, if townships are ...
Cape Town’s sustainability challenges
I had an inspiring discussion with professor Mugendi M’Rithaa, industrial designer, lecturer at CPUT, and a member of the World Design Capital 2014 committee. He spoke about South Africa as being in the “majority world” context, which is where 90% of the world subsists, and Cape Town is by no means separate from that. He ...
Vision for WDC 2014
I spoke to Andrea Grant-Broom, design lecturer at CPUT about World design Capital 2014. She thinks the vision is that Cape Town will attract global interest and also drive a whole host of African projects. “So that we can transform and collaborate with incredible projects happening in Africa, and be more of a gateway, so ...
Designing the bid book for World Design Capital 2014
Christo Maritz, founder of Infestation who designed the bid book, told me about their process… He says it was not as glamorous as it seems, now we look back… At the time Christo said “I can’t believe we have to do the bid book, its an incredible opportunity, where do we start?” “We had two ...
What is the context of Cape Town’s design industry and its sustainability?
Y Tsai, an architect on the World Design Capital 2014 interim committee, says that the creative economy in London or Europe has been seen as a big income generator, as opposed to the financial and other sectors. He thinks that in Cape Town we haven’t really realised the power of that. He is part of ...
Stand-Alone HTML5 Apps
A few weeks ago I was challenged to find a countdown clock for the Enterprise Mobility Forum. “No problem, this sort of thing must be common, we’ll just buy a good one.” Hah! Fat chance! I simply could not find a commercially available solution with the required features. I decided to go open-source. I knew ...
