While the Open Design Afrika Virtual Festival will be livestreamed from the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, access for a global and local audience will be entirely virtual. In addition to adhering to Covid-19 safety protocols and to still create accessibility also to marginalised communities who have always been a vital audience to include, ODA has negotiated with a few partners like TooMuchWifi, Stellenbosch Academy in Cape Town and KNUST in Ghana as well as a few others in Afrika, to set up strong Wi-Fi locations in different communities.
In line with a focus on a multi-level, truly convivial programme, these measures aim to ensure that several people from marginalised communities can still be fully integrated and engaged in the discussions and workshops.
Despite being a digital offering, the ODA 2020 programme will be as robust as in previous years. The five-day festival includes activities focused on key themed days, namely: Afrika is Rising Day, Global Inspiration Day, Future-ready Skills with Heads, Hands and Hearts Day, Afrika Stories Open Day and Family Makers Day.
The series of dialogues, workshops and virtual coffee networking sessions will bring together a global audience with inspirators and creatives from across the Afrikan continent and the world. The festival programme is geared towards ODA’s ‘pledge to design a better world’ and promises participants critical and insightful discussions and take-aways about the present, the future and the disruption, hacking, skills and resources required to bridge them.
In addition to these exciting and valuable discussions and networking opportunities, participants will also have the opportunity to get (virtually) hands-on through a series of demonstrations, workshops, and DIY elements at the Family Makers Day. This part of the programme strongly emphasises collective learning through playing and doing. Utilising hands-on making, tech and games, this is intended to be a creative maker's experience to change mindsets, develop new insights and future skills, for the whole family in the comfort of their homes. A few makers' experiences will also be hosted at the V&A Waterfront at Workshop17 for families who want to attend. Makers experiences are important building blocks to develop future skills and to ignite design-led innovation that can drive the design of future Afrikan cities and lifeworld.
“Investing in the integration of creativity across all curricula will strike a much-needed balance in developing the whole brain. It is not only crucial to create conducive, playful and inclusive learning environments but also to develop creative and emotional intelligence, nurture critical thinking and problem seeking and solving capabilities, design thinking and other future skills; doing so is imperative to unlock and optimise new potential in all children, change mindsets and behaviour, which will empower and enable them to develop new aspirations to design their preferred futures,” says Open Design Afrika founder and executive director Suné Stassen.
General access tickets for Open Design Afrika 2020 are free. Participants can register for each event on the ODA website.
