There are complex challenges to stimulating the design scene in the most unequal country in the world, the founder of Design Week South Africa Margot Molyneux tells Dezeen in this interview.
Design Week South Africa is a new two-part event with an instalment that took place in Johannesburg earlier in October and a second chapter starting in Cape Town today.
Molyneux ? a fashion designer and former managing editor at the magazine House and Leisure ? launched the event with an ambition to invigorate the local industry and increase public awareness about the importance of design.
Above: Margot Molyneux has launched Design Week South Africa. Top image: a modular parklet will be installed in Cape Town for the event
She told Dezeen she had in mind members of the community "who don't have the privileges of travelling and being inspired by creativity". "One of the things that I really wanted to do with this is to have events that are free," Molyneux told Dezeen.
"So the barrier to entry is much lower for people to exhibit and to attend, so that people can actually feel the joys of inspiration and pride of viewing something interesting and beautiful and creative," she continued.
"Locally anyway, this has always been reserved to a convention centre space, which obviously then only allows certain people to enter and to exhibit."
Wealth gap an obstacle to growth of design
Molyneux explained that the wealth gap in South African society created a d...