Afrofuture

Afrofuture invites the inspiring visionaries that make up Africa's futuristic, innovation-lead design culture to Milan Design Week 2013. From critical design, zine-making workshops to coffin-consultancy and arduino-mashups, Afrofuture is a powerful insight into the design future of the world's second largest continent. With Ben Weaver and Nana Ocran.

Tech-charged, idea-fuelled, space-obsessed. The world's second-largest continent is journeying to new frontiers.

Through media, events and performance, la Rinascente will demonstrate the exciting mind-shift in African technology and how it's radically shaping new notions of design. From South Africa's Fablabs to Kenya's 'Silicon savannah', the tech boom in Africa is a certainty. Africa's digital diaspora has elbowed its way into the Afropolitan conversation, but there's a newer narrative emerging – African design. The continent is developing on its own terms, with savvy innovators emerging from the creative quarter and rebranding their urban spaces. It's moving away from visual clichés and forging experimental collaborations with technologists, writers, musicians, photographers, illustrators, architects, coders, developers and cultural commentators. This is a movement that's modifying Africa's past and present and bringing it into the future.

This design week, la Rinascente will show festival-goers how Africa's newest makers, thinkers and dreamers are being spurred on by visions of the future. Afrofuture, an experimental programme curated by Beatrice Galilee, will ambitiously initiate an international design discourse around the exciting new conversations bursting out of all corners of Africa.