Design Indaba 2017: meet ten keynote speakers

For the fourth consecutive year, It’s Nice That has media partnered with Design Indaba. We will be delivering news, highlights, interviews and reaction direct from each day of the three-day conference from Cape Town. This year promises to be bigger and better, with fashion designer Selly Raby Kane leading the art direction. The event will be live broadcast via simulcast to a number of South African cities, allowing each presentation to resonate around the country. Design Indaba will also be hosting the first-ever European Simulcast at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As we pack our bags for 2017’s Design Indaba which opens in Cape Town next week, we kick off our coverage of the event with a whistle-stop tour of ten of the long list of superstar creatives who will be speaking at the festival from the 1-3 March 2017.

Olafur Eliasson

Artist Olafur Eliasson, who has previously transformed the Tate’s turbine hall into a sunset, is on a mission to make the world’s thinkers into doers.

Joe Gebbia

Co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, designer Joe Gebbia recently tweeted his support of refugees and urged his followers to donate to a UN refugee agency.

Aries Moross

London-based designer, illustrator and art director Aries Moross is an It’s Nice That favourite and a multicoloured ray of sunshine in the design world.

Marina Willer

We have previously described former Here speaker Marina Willer as “incredibly iconic.” Creative director Marina was the first female partner at Pentagram London.

Robin Rhode

South African artist Robin Rhode, now based in Berlin, uses public spaces to frame his visual work.

Lernert and Sander

Dutch artists and filmmakers Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug are well known on the creative scene for their cheeky approach to films and installations.

Stuart Forrest

The CEO of the brilliant Triggerfish Animation studio. Stuart Forrest, is the producer behind Africa’s two most successful film exports: Adventures in Zambezia and Khumba.

Nelly Ben Hayoun

Another familiar face on It’s Nice That, French-born, London-based experience designer Nelly Ben Hayoun works with engineers and scientists to make the impossible, possible.

Luis von Ahn

Guatemalan entrepreneur, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University and crowdsourcing “pioneer” Luis von Ahn created CAPTCHAs and the language learning platform Duolingo.

Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning information designer, artist and an author of Dear Data, who seeks to “focus my practice and research on experimenting on new visual ways and new visual languages to represent data to make it more humane more contextual and engaging.”