Our pick of the talks from 2014's Design Indaba event in Cape Town

Last year’s excellent Design Indaba conference in Cape Town saw dozens of speakers take to the stage over the course of three days of creative insight and enlightenment. The videos of the talks are in the throes of being released over on the Design Indaba site which got us feeling all nostalgic about the raft of great stuff we saw. The conference was full of memorable moments – from Thomas Heatherwick announcing the opening of a new art museum in Cape Town to Stefan Sagmeister leading the hall in song – but this is a personal selection of some of our highlights.

Tom self-deprecatingly dubbed himself the warm-up act for Mr Heatherwick but his excellent talk on IDEO, behaviour and design’s ability to tackle some of society’s deepest set problems proved he was in nobody’s shadow.
See Tom’s full talk here

In the wrong hands, talks about branding can be deathly dry or toe-curlingly self-indulgent but Wolff Olins’ Ije Nwokorie showed how it should be done. The full talk is not yet available but this clip – in which Ije talks about branidng being messy – gives you a flavour of what’s to come.

Alongside so many big-name luminaries, Design Indaba makes a real effort to give a platform to some of the design stars of the future. Last year’s selection was uniformly excellent but Agi Haines from The Royal College Of Art stood out for her innovative thinking and extraordinary way of thinking about design.
Watch Agi’s talk here

Photographer David Goldblatt is one of the major artistic figures working in South Africa today. His spellbinding talk took a simple format – talking us through some of his favourite and most famous pictures – but the stories he has to tell are genuinely breathtaking. We can’t wait for the full film to be released.

From Sagmeister to Experimental Jestet there was no shortage of graphic design talent on stage at Design Indaba. But Dean Poole’s talk really stayed with me as he talked us through how he sees creativity and showed off some of the Alt Group’s fantastic work.
Watch Dean’s full talk here