Open Design festival to kick off in Cape Town

The Open Design festival starts this weekend in Cape Town and runs until August 25.

It is a 12-day city-wide interactive festival, featuring talks by forward-thinking designers and exhibitions by leading creatives.

It's an opportunity to explore how creative approaches to problem-solving and sustainable design can benefit South Africa's economy and society.

Some events at the festival include getting students and adults to develop their innovative and entrepreneurial skills by doing things like designing, building and coding robots at The Experience Workshop from Finland, and Africa's first International STEAM Symposium, which will show the power of integrating creative skills, art and design thinking into the teaching of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects to develop children's innovative skills.

The TALK100 discussion sessions cover topics like social design, rebranding communities, creating multisensory experiences, and what it takes to be a woman game developer in a male-dominated industry.

A highlight of the festival is Made in Everywhere - a start-up co-founded by sisters Michelle and Natasha Talliard. Their aim is to redesign perspectives of the Cape Flats.

''Anyone having spent any time in Mitchells Plain or any other community or township on the Cape Flats knows the stigma and negative publicity attached to these areas," say the sisters.

• For a list of all the events on at the Open Design festival, see opendesignct.com.

• For more on the Talliard sisters, see madeineverywhere.co.za

• This article was originally published in The Times.