The South African Design Scene

South African design

In South Africa, craft may be ancient, but design is young. With the launch in 2017 of the world-class Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa designed by British architect Thomas Heatherwick in Cape Town’s historic grain silo on the waterfront – which was the biggest public art space to open on the continent for more than a century – along with the beach city’s thriving design and gallery scene and annual art fair, South Africa is finally attracting global attention in terms of culture. South African design, in disciplines spanning from furniture to ceramics, is one of the most exciting sectors for new collectors.

The Woodstock Design District in particular, a suburb located between Table Mountain and the harbor, has become a key cultural hub. Once a farming hamlet that developed into a lively multicultural suburb in the 1800s, before turning into an industrial area in the early 1900s that led to a mix of Victorian row houses, semi-detached townhouses, factories and warehouses, Woodstock is a hotspot with the highest concentration of design stores and art galleries in the country. Over the past decade, the cheap rentals for unusual spaces, proximity to the city and high crime rate in Johannesburg have enticed creatives to move to Woodstock, and today it is filled with shops, showrooms, eateries, design studios and high-end contemporary art galleries like Stevenson, Blank Projects, SMAC and Goodman Gallery. The design landscape may be more widespread now, but Cape Town remains extremely vibrant.

Much interest has been focused on Southern Guild, the continent’s most renowned collectible design gallery founded in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan with its first permanent home in Woodstock, which has been instrumental in boosting world-class, locally-made limited-edition design and giving South African design a voice. Nurturing designers, it became the first African gallery to participate in Design Miami in 2011, organized the Guild Design Fair in Cape Town – the first international design fair in Africa – presenting international galleries in 2014 and 2015, and was the first to be featured at Christie’s London’s annual design auction in 2015. Through The Guild Group, the husband-and-wife duo have also established a sustainable creative and commercial infrastructure in South Africa, and its platforms cover practically all aspects needed to build a credible, flourishing design industry.

Dr Thomas Girst, Head of BMW Group Cultural Engagement, which is a partner of Southern Guild, says, “It is important as a global company with 30 locations alone for our plants worldwide that we engage the local culture. It’s not about exporting the Munich Philharmonic, with which we collaborate as well, on a tour worldwide. It’s more important as a global brand that intercultural aspects is not something we aspire to but something that is the basis of what it is that we do also in our core business. We want to be at the forefront of cultural development, as we are with our core product in terms of leadership when it comes to technology and digitalization.”

Sport and Injuries

What You Need To Know

Statistics on Sports Injuries
You Need to Know Before your Children Participates in Any Sports


The top three reasons: adults, coaches and parents.
Among athletes ages 5 to 14, 28 percent of percent of football players,

25 percent of baseball players, 22 percent of soccer players, 15 percent of basketball players, and 12 percent of softball players were injured while playing their respective sports.

Study also found that 70 percent of athletes said they had practiced or played with an injury, compared with 33 percent of non-athletes. Forty percent of athletes were diagnosed with osteoarthritis after college, compared with 24 percent of non-athletes.

A 2007 study found that, in high school and college football, there are an average of 7.23 catastrophic head injuries per year: there were 0.67 injuries per 100,000 high school players and 0.21 injuries per 100,000 college players.

In the U.S., about 30 million children and teens participate in some form of organized sports, and more than 3.5 million injuries each year, which cause some loss of time of participation, are experienced by the participants. Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries.

Drug Overdose Increasing

At an Alarming Rate in the US

Cause of death of Americans under 50
Overdoses are now the leading cause of death of Americans under the age of 50.

According to preliminary data compiled by The New York Times, deaths last year likely topped 59,000 -- 19 percent more than the year before.
In Ohio, they were up even more.

On May 26, Cleveland Police Sgt. Timothy Maffo-Judd's body camera was running as he approached a man slumped in his car. It turned out that the man was minutes from a fatal drug overdose.

Three applications of Narcan -- the anti-overdose drug -- and the victim finally started coming around.

Maffo-Judd says it's become a grim routine, and he's even encountered the same person twice. "That's pretty common," he says.

There were 11 overdoses on Monday night alone in Cleveland -- two of them were fatal.

At least 4,100 people died from unintentional drug overdoses last year in Ohio-- a 36 percent increase from the past year.

Kentucky, West Virginia and New Hampshire have also experienced shocking increases, along with the East Coast.

Most of it is tied to heroin or prescription painkillers, often laced with a powerful synthetic opioid known as fentanyl.

In Ohio alone, nearly four billion opioid pills were prescribed across Ohio

3 Destructive Effects of Enhancement Drugs

What You Need to Know

Destruction of Your Body's Ability to Regulate its Self

According to the Mayo Clinic, diuretics such as furosemide and spironolactone are sometimes used to cause a significant amount of weight loss in a very short period of time or to mask the use of other drugs. Because they flush excess fluid from the body, however, they can also cause severe dehydration. Dehydration can cause a number of other potentially dangerous side effects, including electrolyte imbalances such as potassium deficiency, muscle cramps, dizziness, extremely low blood pressure, exhaustion and heart problems. If left untreated, these conditions can be fatal.


Destruction of Your Heart and entire Cardiovascular System

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, oral and injectable anabolic steroid abuse is associated with increased risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke. The use of growth hormones such as human chorionic gonadotropin and corticotrophin can cause diabetes, which also increases the risk of cardiovascular problems. The use of diuretics can also cause heart arrhythmias.


Emotional Damages

Anabolic-androgenic steroids can cause severe rage, aggressive outbursts or violence. They may also induce the onset of psychiatric disorders such as depression. According to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, research has shown that steroids can also cause delusions such as beliefs of invincibility, paranoid jealousy, excessive irritability and moodiness and impaired judgment. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narcotics or painkillers are sometimes used to produce feelings of euphoria and invincibility. While they may be psychologically stimulating, they can cause delusional beliefs about an athlete's physical prowess and abilities that lead him to act in reckless ways. Additionally, while stimulants such as ephedrine and amphetamines can increase alertness and reduce feelings of fatigue, they are also known to cause poor judgment and increased hostility.