Twyg is a magazine working at the intersection of fashion and sustainability: inspiring and supporting kinder, fairer, inclusive and nature-friendly futures. This entails creating stories and events to support a transition to sustainable living. For the Design Futures Lab, Twyg designed a series of virtual workshops about sustainability, decoloniality and regeneration as it relates to growing, making, wearing and wasting of fashion in South Africa. By challenging the participants to reflect on the fashion industry, Twyg introduced ideas that will germinate stories about the future of fashion.
Electric South has an award-winning track record in producing storytelling expressed in an immersive format. Electric South, a non-profit, aims to grow the ecosystem of artists using new immersive technologies for storytelling in Africa and to facilitate collaborative information exchanges on the African continent. For the Design Future Labs, Electric South provided support and mentorship to digital visual storytellers and implemented a 3-day in-person lab in Cape Town. The focus was on developing digital prototypes/proof of concept ideas inspired by Twyg’s sustainable fashion workshops. Electric South explored a number of different creative approaches including 360 filmmaking, volumetric capture, world-building, avatar creation, and augmented reality.
Crossover Labs, are immersive media specialists, experts in the curation and creation of cutting-edge projects that combine technical innovation and storytelling. For the Design Future Labs, Crossover Labs will facilitate market access and feedback. All selected concepts will gain access to South African and UK markets with a keen focus on grants, funding and festival strategies.
The British Council’s Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Arts programme works in the diverse and varied countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and the U.K. Their arts programmes are underpinned by research, focused on young people, and are committed to; Supporting the creation of new art and sharing this art to audiences both online and in-person, sharing skills and knowledge between creative communities in the countries of SSA and the U.K and Creating new connections between young people. The Design Futures Lab 2022 formed part of their Creative Economy programme in South Africa and aimed to support young creatives with skills, opportunities, and knowledge that they need to build sustainable creative enterprises, build rich and provocative digital content and facilitate greater access to markets.
