Dezeen and MINI World Tour: pit stop
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: with four cities down and four to go, we're halfway through our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. Before our next stop at London Design Festival in September, here are some movie highlights from our trips to Cape Town, Milan, New York and Berlin.
We kicked off our Dezeen and MINI World Tour at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, where we talked to leading figures in the design world who were speaking at the conference, as well as Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo.
Naidoo reflected on what Africa's burgeoning economy means for design on the continent (above), before taking us on a tour of the upcoming district of Woodstock, a former industrial suburb where many of Cape Town's designers have moved in recent years.
Architect David Adjaye told us why he believes there is a great opportunity for architects in Africa (above), Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde talked about the clothes he is designing that become transparent when you lie and Ben Terrett, head of design at the UK's Government Digital Service, explained the ideas behind the design for the new gov.uk website, which later went on to be named Design of the Year 2013.
Read our round-up of this year's Design Indaba conference »
Watch all our movies from Cape Town »
In April we headed to Milan for the design world's biggest and most important design fair.
Italian architect Fabio Novembre welcomed us to the city (above) and then took us to some of his favourite areas, including a converted farm near the city centre and the San Siro football stadium.
Designers including Tom Dixon and Marcel Wanders discussed the continued importance of Milan to the design world, despite Italy's political and economic difficulties, as well as the growing phenomenon of other companies using the event to copy their products (below).
We interviewed a host of top designers including Ron Arad and Naoto Fukasawa about their latest products and spoke to leading design journalists at our dedicated Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio.
Joseph Grima, former editor of Domus magazine, reflected on the difficult period the city is currently going through, design journalist Kieran Long compared Italy's current generation of designers to the great masters and Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine, discussed the renewed focus on commerce at this year's fair.
Watch all our movies from Milan »
Next up was New York for the USA's leading design week, which this year relaunched itself as NYCxDesign.
Willy Wong, chief creative officer for the city's marketing and tourism agency, told us how the city is hoping the new festival will help boost its design sector (above).
New York designer Stephen Burks gave us a tour of the west side of town, where he lives and works, before taking us to see the High Line and the new buildings by major international architects including Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano that are springing up next to it (above).
In addition, design journalist Monica Khemsurov took us to all the key exhibitions around the Noho Design District.
Watch all our movies from New York »
The German capital was our most recent destination. We checked out DMY International Design Festival Berlin, where graduates and young brands from over 30 countries presented work in the hangars of the former Tempelhof airport.
DMY Berlin founder Joerg Suermann gave us a tour of this year's show (above) as well as taking us to some of his favourite spots in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood where he lives.
Watch all our movies from Berlin »
About Dezeen and MINI World Tour:
Dezeen and MINI are travelling the world together this year, visiting eight cities to discover the most exciting new talents, the hottest trends and the most important themes in architecture and design in 2013.
Our Dezeen and MINI World Tour will take in a selection of the best international fairs, conferences and festivals, where we'll be conducting interviews, making videos and reporting on the most interesting developments.
For the second half of the tour we'll be heading to London for the London Design Festival from 14-22 September, Singapore for the World Architecture Festival and the INSIDE festival from 2-4 October, Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week from 19-27 October and then Miami for Design Miami at the end of the year from 4-8 December.