One Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, I took my youngest son, Angelo, for a robotics lesson in the East City. Hidden behind a pair of small red doors in Buitenkant Street, we stumbled upon a magical world of creativity at the Open Innovation Studio.
“Work. Learn. Share. Change the World.” This is the slogan of a Cape Town organisation called Brightest Young Minds (BYM), an initiative of young people “passionate about exploring, demonstrating and implementing ideas and alternative solutions to the problems plaguing humanity.”
Work. Learn. Share. Change the World One of BYM’s projects is the Open Innovation Studio, a “physical environment that combines the attributes of a shared office, a classroom, a coffee shop and a gallery (which) brings together elements of a business incubator, innovation agency, dynamic public space and members club.” The Studio is located in Cape Town’s East City, next door to the District Six Museum. 
The Open Innovation Studio
There’s a whole range of projects located at the Studio, and the place is filled with wonderful activities. For example, there’s the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, which is doing great work on raising levels of awareness on sustainability challenges, Then there’s Siyavula, an education support organisation funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, which makes resources available to teachers under an open licence.
I also came across a ‘hackathon’ – a group of young people led by Steve Song working on something called the Mesh Potato project. The Mesh Potato is a new device for providing low-cost telephony and Internet in areas where alternative access either doesn’t exist or is too expensive. The project is part of the Village Telco project, also funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, which is developing a low-cost, scalable, standards-based WiFi telephone company toolkit using open source software and open hardware.
The Mesh Potato 'hackathon' at work
- Angelo Boraine hard at work in a creative environment
The Open Innovation Studio is one of over 1000 creative and cultural organisations and industries in the Cape Town Central City, and is a good example of why Cape Town is bidding for World Design Capital in 2014. For more information, see Creative Cape Town, a project of the Cape Town Partnership.
