Young Capetonian designer Y Tsai says it’s shocking how “there aren’t many design-oriented solutions for social problems”. Which is why he embarked on a mission to use good design to improve life.
Tsai says: “Solutions are all make-do. We need houses so we build more houses. But if you study the designs you see they are designed with no human ergonomics in minds.”
Design by quantity surveying “doesn’t satisfy human need. You have a room in which you cannot fit a double bed. Or, if you can fit a double bed, you can’t stand. Even in new developments. Some with three rooms, all for single people, with no thought for a family.”
The problem is that designers and the industry focus on pursuing the elite 10%, the exclusive top end of the market. Hardly any of the local design and so-called “lifestyle” magazines were interested in photographing his nest bunk-beds.
It was this innovation that brought Tsai international attention after it won an international Red Dot Design Award and the Pick n Pay 36 Square Metre Challenge, which he shared with designer Aram Lello. Tsai and Lello met for the first time through the competition and they now work together on projects.
The success of the space-saving nest bunks, first installed at the Helping Hands orphanage in Wellington for children with HIV/Aids, spawned an NGO called Shoebox Homes. Tsai hopes to introduce a thousand beds for orphanages, low- cost houses, possibly even prisons.
“It has given me tremendous insight into the power of how good socially conscious design can, and will, change people’s lives. While it was exciting designing the nested bunk beds on paper and exhilarating having the design prototyped in the factory, it was only when I stood in the orphanage where the beds were first tested that its true impact hit me. It is not just the charitable act of the project that brought joy to the children, but also the vast improvement the design has made to their living conditions.”
Ironically, the major champions of design with social responsibility are found in developed countries.
“South Africa faces many problems that require local designers to come up with creative solutions and turn them into opportunities. A great example is Street Wire, a successful company that rounded up street-wire artists and used the creative drive collectively.
“A designer has two challenges — a solution to the problem and something that inspires yourself, your imagination.” Tsai’s aesthetics emphasise the concept. “I choose to strip the object down — some people say it’s Zen.”
His own home is a clean, uncluttered space, but he lives with many of his prototypes — mistakes that either didn’t work or didn’t take off.
“Most of my projects are concept- driven, with a goal to be unconventional by re-examining tradition, as well as experimental. The re-examination process often leads to designs that are multi-functional. The nest bunk beds can be used as a sofa, stepped seating as well as beds —This approach applies to both furniture design and architecture.”
He is a trained architect and his latest project involves looking at using and recycling Safmarine containers. “They need to conform to the same criteria as buildings for health and safety, space, insulation and so on — In parts of Europe people want to live in containers, they think it’s cool, they build container cities.” Not here though, so the project involves focusing on using the containers as “Lego” to create computer laboratories, relief housing, a fan park for 2010 and as sports and community centres.
Recycling is one approach, but the major challenge remains reducing the carbon footprint. Designing with environmentally friendly materials “can push up the costs and make designs less competitive”. He singles out bamboo for having great potential as a wood substitute. It grows quickly and is exceedingly versatile.
Tsai is confident that South Africa is forging an identity in the world of design and that someone will be able to point to a design at an international show and say, “You can see that is a South African design.”
South Africans, he believes, are inventive by nature. “We don’t have to import ideas: we have them.”
Y Tsai has won the national round of the British Council’s International Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The competition seeks to identify creative entrepreneurs between the ages of 25 and 35 in the field of design, particularly in diverse and untapped markets, to give them worldwide exposure.
Tsai will enter the international round with finalists from Nigeria, India, China, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and Venezuela