"Everything truly interesting begins with a question," says Daniel Ting Chong, who conceptualised the campaign. "With an overarching theme of ‘support’ as a starting point, we pushed it further and asked ourselves how AI, bots, computers and applications ‘combine’ with us to create our work and support us to make beautiful things."
Ting Chong designed a foundational set of shapes for the AI to work with. The final 13 forms range from squares and triangles to stars and polygons filled with colours drawn from a palette of Bubblegum Pink, Crocodile Green, Fast Food Mustard and Night Blue.
Ting Chong then added physics to the mix, making the shapes bounce and settle in a never-ending sequence of random combinations. Each time the AI code ran, a new design was made, creating an infinite number of variations and combinations.
The next challenge for Ting Chong was helping the AI communicate key information around the event through the design – things like encouraging Design Indaba Conference delegates to save water or telling them where the bathrooms are. "These are not the type of things computers would ‘think’ about," he says.
The design team created a single document filled with a description of the programme itself and a string of numbers. The entire promotional campaign for the upcoming event – from online banners to posters and social media posts – was created using this one document and aims to illustrate how simplicity in design can provide an elegant solution to a complex problem.
The Design Indaba 2019 will be held at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town. The award-winning event is powered by Woolworths, Mercedes-Benz and Liberty.
Ticket sales for the Design Indaba Conference 2019 are officially open. Booking can be done through www.webtickets.co.za and can be purchased here.
For more information, visit www.designindaba.com.