Social Impact

Ravi Naidoo is the Founder and Managing Director of Interactive Africa, a Cape Town based media and marketing company, which he founded in 1994. His main business interest has always been on media, creativity, marketing and project management. Ravi is possibly best known for establishing the international Design Indaba, which has become recognized as one of the world’s leading design institutions through its flagship conference and expo annually held in Cape Town.

Porky Hefer is not a designer. He is a cultural connector, a creative adventurer. He does more than design; he weaves optimism.

Hefer spent 16 years in advertising, during which time he worked as a Creative Director in Cape Town and New York agencies, and became one of South Africa’s most awarded creatives. Realizing that the higher he climbed, the less he personally created, in 2007 he left advertising to start up a creative consultancy, Animal Farm. Four years later he founded Porky Hefer Design. Hefer focuses on conceptual precepts, which manifest in three-dimensional forms in a variety of executions, from public sculpture to product and furniture design. Intrigued by the reactions and energy a piece can generate, he embraces Africa and the skills that are readily available indigenously, rather than trying to emulate foreign processes. Hefer sees beauty in the functional, the ordinary and discarded. He regularly challenges our relationships with everyday objects, inspiring us to look again.

Y.Tsai is not a design studio. It is a hope cultivator, a shaper of security and pride. It does more than construct buildings: it constructs opportunity.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Tsai Design Studio was founded by architect, Y.Tsai, in 2005. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, it generates creative solutions to architecture, furniture and interior design challenges. The South African winner of the International Young Design Entrepreneur Award, sponsored by the British Council, Y.Tsai can also count the prestigious international Red Dot Award among its many accolades. Y.Tsai strives to produce provocative designs that are unconventional, yet instilled with a strong sense of cultural and social relevance. This is evident in projects such as the Safmarine Sports Centre, a corporate social responsibility project that recently won an Award for Architecture from the Cape Institute of Architecture, as well as Urban Mosaic Project, one of the winning entries for Design Indaba's Your Street Challenge.

Heinrich Wolff is a Cape Town-based architect focusing on an architectural practice of design, advocacy, research, documentation and social change. Wolff’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, South American Architectural Biennale and many other worldwide exhibitions including: Berlin, London, Chicago, Dubai, Florence, New York, Istanbul, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Shanghai and South Africa.

Many of Wolff’s projects have been awarded local and international honours, with the most significant being the Lubetkin Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects for the best building outside the European Union in 2005/2006. In 2007 Wolff was awarded the prestigious DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture.

Wolff has taught at universities in South Africa and the US on design, theory and technology. He is currently teaching at the University of Cape Town, where his research has focussed on 20th Century architecture in the Third World, innovation in architecture at times of social change and housing in South Africa.