Designing a better South Africa

What can YOU do to design a better South Africa for yourself? The term design can be defined as plans that are produced in order to improve or create something. Design is a process or an activity, and has certain outcomes. Design allows a fair amount of things that need to be taken into consideration to achieve specific results. Design could be about any products, services, systems or environments. It can be done effectively or poorly but ultimately a good design has a purpose.

With design goes process. In other words, certain steps need to be followed or executed in order for a design to work out effectively. A design should have purpose, ad end goal that needs to be met. Usually there would be a shortcoming or a weak point which would result in a design to improve that specific deficiency. Gavin Mageni speaks about how we as citizens of South Africa have the potential to redesign our roles in society.  

Designers ask the question “what if?”  What if service delivery is never an issue? What if there was unemployment rates were much lower? South Africa faces many issues that plays a role in socio-economic factors. Firstly corruption leads to an unfair economic situation which, at the end of the day only benefits the rich. Ordinary citizens automatically fall into a modern caste system. Other issues are cultural distortion, alcohol abuse, high unemployment and low wages as well as the lack of leadership skills .A solution to e.g., the unemployed rates can be a national strategy on entrepreneurship.

Question is, how do we promote innovative design to improve socio- economic factors in our country? In order to change things one needs to change one’s way of thinking, there needs to be a paradigm shift. How can we as individuals in our various communities, affect change? In order to achieve change in the socio economic sector one needs follow a process of co-creation or shared knowledge. It starts with you. We need to innovative solutions to promote sustainable growth and secure jobs. The SABS Design Institute sets out to create designs for positive change in the country. South Africa needs has come up with ways to improve socio economic issues by increasing their focus on science and technology, ideas to drive economic growth.

 One should listen and create and with that change the world around you. This can be done by means of research for development. Change starts with you.