The beginning: Sasdi Resource Library at Mfuleni

The first day at the Centre. It is located on the top floor of a beautiful  an popular pre-school that Sasdi built.

 Two young volunteers about to start sorting out the  book shelves.

The toy shelves before work started.

I have started a collaboration with Ali Corbett of the Sasdi Foundation on a resource centre they are equipping in Mfuleni, Cape Town. The resource centre will loan educational toys and books to pre-school teachers from schools in the community, for use in their classes. The teachers will also receive a training course in how to better learn and play with their wards.

Sustainable packaging makeovers

Michelle Baron: Kleenex tissues

Vaughn Gunnell: Robertson Spices

Katie Mylrea: Albany Bread

I gave my third year Visual Communications students at Vega the Schoolof Brand Leadership in Cape Town the brief to find an existing pack design on South African supermarket shelves and re-design it to make it more sustainable. So many of the products on our supermarket shelves are over packaged, or use packaging that is not recyclable. They were encouraged to use the principles of re-use, reduce and recycle in order to achieve this.

Vaughn Gunnell tackled spice packaging. His idea was to use used tetrapack packaging, which is hard to recycle, clean it, coat it with another layer of branding, and re-use it for the spices, which he aptly named “Second Wind.” Vaughn became so passionate abut packaging that he studied another year of it ai the Institute of Packaging.

Katie Mylrea re-designed bread packaging, as the current plastic packaging is one of the items that often litters our streets. She proposes a wax coated paper packaging, which is pre-perforated to be re-used as sandwich packaging. She added fun facts about endangered animals as the design element on this packaging.

Michelle Baron suggested a way to improve disposable tissue packaging. She made her packs out of recycled cardboard, which when the tissues run out, can be re-used as postcards. The idea was to send the postcard to the person who made one cry in the first place, to get things of ones chest. The packs came in different variations, all depicting a different tragic situation.

All three projects were nominated as Loerie finalists, and Michelle Baron won a bronze Loerie with her set of tissue packs.

We work with Ons Plek on their new safe room

We are so excited to just have, (with the help of my wonderful friends from Sweet and Soutie), completed a safe room revamp for 'Ons Plek Projects'. 'Ons Plek' is situated on Albertus Street in what is known as The Fringe district in Cape Town. They are an intake shelter for girls only, meaning they take girls in that have been living on the street. 

I contacted 'Ons Plek'  requesting that they give us any challenge they are facing that we could tackle with our creative skills. 'Ons Plek' then asked us to revamp their safe room. This is a room where girls go when they can not be with the other girls because of a wide range of factors. One section of the room is used as a wash room and bath room, and this could not be changed. We were asked to make the room feel safe and positive for the girl who has to be in it.  We started discussing the possibility of a detailed mural, so that the girls would have lots to look at. We initially wanted to incorporate other furnishings such as shelves but after brainstorming with our client decided against it. They advised us to not have anything in the room that could be taken out or used to inflict harm on oneself or others.

My fellow Sweet and Soutie members were amazing. (Sweet and Soutie is a group of creative women. We are all either design educators or freelance creatives.)  They obtained a paint sponsor, (thank you JP from Midas Earthcoat) and helped me paint the mural, and even brought snacks, which I had completely forgotten about!

The safe room the first time we saw it. Chantelle had a bee in her bonnet about the exposed geyser, and didn't rest until she had commissioned a plan to hide it!

I firmly believe in co-designing with clients, as they know their business best We discussed several themes for murals: a city scape, various landscapes. As the room is quite dark, and the washing machines and basins fill the bottom half of the wall we decided on a tree theme, which would work well higher up on the wall and could be light and airy. We wanted to add positive quotes or words, but together with the client decided against it, as the girls speak many different languages and come from many African countries. This also led to the next insight, namely that some creatures like owls and chameleons have negative connotations in certain cultures. So we had to make sure that our creatures in the tree were culturally neutral. Our client also reminded us that most girls at the shelter are teenagers, so the room couldn't look  like a kiddies play room. I came up with colour schemes that were suited for young ladies, and the client chose Option 1.

Henriette and Margaret. 

Lorraine.

Astrid brought her beautiful daughter Nina along, who also turned out to be an awesome photographer and helped us document our work-in-progress.

Michael-Rae and Jarryd  designed , sponsored and built the geyser cupboard. It looks so much better now, and those two rock!  Someone hire them quick!

All done, we used blackboard paint in the frames, so the girls can add their own creative flair to the room. I love that each artist brought their own style to the mural, but that it all works as a whole because of the restricted colour scheme.

Thank you Chantelle, Henriette, Margaret, Michelle, Kirsten, Lianne, Lorraine, Astrid, Nina, Michael-Rae, Jarryd, husband-of-the-year JP and boyfriend-of-the-year David. We had so much fun doing this together. And thank you to our clients at 'Ons Plek', Charline and Yumna, for giving us the opportunity to work together with them.