The discipline of design is increasingly the place where data and the drawing board collide, with almost all of the designers on stage at Design Indaba 2017 touching on, one way or another, how they apply their skills to help make sense of an info-saturated world.

Also from Ijeoma, 'wage islands' project an ingenious interactive installation, (gotta love alliteration), which sees a 500-piece laser-cut acrylic model raised or lowered out of a water tank to convey the issues of wage and housing inequalities in NYC, demonstrating at the touch of button where one can afford to live in New York based on income. As in the previous example providing a tangible picture of an abstract concept.

Ijeoma takeouts: Think like citizens not just creatives", "Use data for people not just consumers, and the quotable clincher Let's make conversation-pieces not just masterpieces".

Her book entitled Dear Data, co-authored with friend Stefanie Posavec contains 'data postcards' from the project, which saw the pair mail postcard-size, data-inspired illustrations to each other every week for a year.

You can give it a try. All you need is paper, some coloured pens and a commitment to visually map/plot/graph any mundane aspect of your daily life, for example how many times you check the time in a week, the number of thank yous given and received, or the number of times you smiled at strangers. This is really the essence of spatial mathematical thinking and might be considered in primary schools to advantage.

As one of the nicknames for Cape Town is Slaapstad (rhymes with Kaapstad, Afrikaans for Cape Town, and means 'sleep city'), Design Indaba seemed an appropriate target audience for the invitation to participate in the project via an app, featuring the music of Marconi Unions Adrift, apparently the most relaxing music ever produced. Download it and sleep your way through this global research project.

Gathering biodata is also seen in the work of local award-winning Red & Yellow School graduate Carina Bonse, who has developed a wearable based on her research monitoring the Ecoli levels due to sewage on Cape Town beaches, via a smart armband.

Images courtesy of DesignIndaba.com.

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