The Human Touch: How South African Craft Offers an AI Antidote

Is this the most concentrated argument yet for South Africa’s place in the global design conversation? We take you inside an award-winning room that makes the case for design from the tip of Africa…

A new meeting and conferencing space in Johannesburg, designed by Clout/SA in collaboration with Proportion Design Studio, brings together more than 20 local makers to deliver what may be the most concentrated argument yet for South Africa’s place in the global design conversation.

Over the last 30 years, South Africa has been building one of the world’s most distinctive design identities. Rooted in a confluence of craft traditions (beadwork, embroidery, weaving, ceramics) and shaped by designers who are equally fluent in contemporary form and cultural memory, it is an aesthetic that resists easy categorisation. It is also, increasingly, one that the world is buying.

Clout/SA, a local design platform and interior practice, has facilitated more than R225 million in South African design exports since 2021, placing over 70 000 works of design and craft across more than 25 countries. The UK is its strongest international market and the platform’s latest project, the Isaac Shongwe Room, makes the case more vividly than any catalogue could.

The brief

The client, Taro Park, asked for a multi-use space capable of hosting leadership teams, government partners and a range of stakeholders. They wanted a room that could shift between meeting formats, with a catering area that could be concealed when not in use. But the deeper ambition extended beyond function: to create a room in which South African art, craft and design became the primary language of the space.

Clout/SA approached the brief through the lens it has sharpened over more than a decade of practice: designing interior spaces that enable established and emerging creatives to share culturally rooted narratives through the objects that furnish them. The technical design and implementation was delivered in collaboration with architect Tuami Zulu of Proportion Design Studio.

‘We wanted anyone who entered to be blown away by the powerful, vibrant expressions of South African design and craft,’ says Tracy Lynch, Executive Creative Director of Clout/SA. ‘To be moved by how unique our creativity is and to understand that when South Africans join together, we are a magnificent force that has the ability to change people’s perceptions of who we are as a nation.’

The Isaac Shongwe Room was among three Clout/SA projects recognised at the inaugural African Interior Design Awards (AIDA) 2026, held on 24 and 25 July in Cotonou, Benin. This is the first international programme celebrating creativity and forward-thinking design across the African continent. The Union House office redesign also received recognition in the Office Interior Design category, while their collaborative textile collection ‘Stitched: A Story of Our Home’, developed with the Keiskamma Art Project, was named Product of the Year in the Homeware and Decoration category.

The space

The room is divided into three zones: a central meeting circle with fully mobile furniture, three fixed perimeter seating areas, and a deli kitchen.

As you enter the room, you are met with a monumental embroidered hanging by the Keiskamma Art Project titled ‘The Resilience Piece’. The Keiskamma Art Project is a collective of artists and embroiderers based in a small, heritage-rich village in the Eastern Cape, called Hamburg. The work, which fills the far wall entirely, documents a rural community’s experience of the Covid-19 pandemic: its disruptions, losses and response, rendered in thread by approximately 12 artists over nearly a year.

The Keiskamma Art Project has, over more than two decades, built an international reputation for textile work that functions simultaneously as community record, economic engine and art. To encounter a piece of this scale and ambition inside a conferencing space is to understand something essential about Clout/SA’s design approach, which is not to decorate, but to bear witness.

Cebo Mvubu, Director of the Keiskamma Art Project said:

‘The collaboration process helps us; it connects us with the outside world. We are quite isolated here in Hamburg in the Eastern Cape; we are not exposed to as much media or social media. Winning the AIDA award recognises us, it recognises the collaboration with Clout/SA. This helps shine a light on our projects, our community and the work we do, which will bring new partnerships and collaborations, helping us grow and evolve.’

Beneath the hanging, four rugs by Siyanda Mbele (one large-scale work and three patterned companions, all manufactured by Brabetz Carpets) cover the floor. Their geometric language reads differently as furniture moves and light shifts across the day.

Overhead, custom cork panels by Wiid Design wrap both the ceiling and walls. The Cape Town studio of Laurie Wiid Van Heerden has made cork one of the more recognisable material signatures in contemporary South African interiors. Here, it gives the space acoustic warmth and a captivating sculptural texture in conversation with the embroidery’s profundity.

Moving toward the kitchen, the register shifts. Handmade beaded screens by Kalki Design Studio divide the catering area from the main space, their surface detail picking up the tactile language established by the Keiskamma hanging. Hand-tiled surfaces in the kitchen itself extend the studio’s work, as do three servers that sit beguilingly between functional object and craft piece.

‘Including pieces and elements that share South Africa’s heritage and rich craft legacy was a key focus,’ says Lynch. ‘Unique materials were also central; beads, wool, cork, embroidery and clay were among the most exciting material expressions we selected.’

Above the meeting circle hangs a beaded linear pendant light by Mash.T Design Studio, run by designer Thabisa Mjo, whose work has been shown at Milan Design Week and forms part of the permanent collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Drawing the eye upward, the pendant’s handcrafted surface catches the natural light differently across the day, shifting in character as the room below it reconfigures.

The platform behind the project

An independent platform since 2018, Clout/SA has become one of South Africa’s most significant design exporters, with revenue growing by more than 160% in 2023 alone and more than 80% of orders now destined for international markets.

The platform represents more than 70 designer-makers on its Portal to Africa marketplace, and runs a mentorship programme it has sustained for over a decade, specifically designed to equip emerging designers with the business skills necessary to survive and scale in a commercial design economy.

‘The emerging aesthetic of contemporary South African design is not a conventional process of sharing a nation’s history,’ Lynch has said of the platform’s purpose. ‘It’s a creative opportunity for designers to delve deeper into aspects of identity; to resurrect and amplify the crafted poetry of our past. It’s an opportunity to tell the beautiful stories we need to remember now, so that we can all see the future differently.’

The Isaac Shongwe Room, with its convergence of community embroidery, hand-beaded light, cork architecture and geometric rug-making, is that argument made physical.

Photographer: Greg Cox