Design with an African focus, truly immersive storytelling, futurist imaginings, incubation spaces, and making sense of big data.
Here’s our next installment that shines a spotlight on people, collectives, and organizations doing wonderful things.
Design Indaba
Based in Cape Town and founded by Ravi Naidoo, Design Indaba is both an online publication (with a rather wonderful newsletter) and a big annual conference and festival focused on design and creativity. Previous speakers include Olafur Eliasson, Zach Lieberman, Tea Uglow, Alex McDowell, and Nelly Ben Hayoun.
ANAGRAM
ANAGRAM is an award-winning creative collective, with Amy Rose and May Abdalla at its core. The group makes immersive experiences that go beyond technology and hype to embrace real life stories, play, humor, and tactile experiments. ANAGRAM’s work includes the extraordinary Door Into the Dark and a new project, The Collider, at IDFA DocLab this year.
Angela Oguntala
Angela Oguntala works in futures thinking and design. She gave a brilliant TEDx talk on ways that we can re-imagine the future by turning our attention to stories and innovations from the Global South and other spaces that are often ignored or misrepresented.
NEW INC
NEW INC is the first museum-led incubator for art, design, and technology, under the auspices of the New Museum in New York. Originally led by the inimitable Julia Kaganskiy, it is now run by the equally awesome Stephanie Pereira, formally of Kickstarter. NEW INC’s current members and community are interdisciplinary by design. Previous members include Scatter, Emilie Baltz, Hyphen Labs, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Rachel Rossin.
Data & Society
Data & Society is a research institute founded by Danah Boyd. It focuses on social and cultural issues arising from data-centric and automated technologies, issues that impact all of our lives now but often feel overwhelming and too complex to tackle. The institute’s research is well worth digging into, covering topics like media manipulation, AI and human rights, and algorithms and extremism.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more about our project here.