Author: Caro McCaw

South Dunedin suburban branding, and local bird hunt.

The Dunedin City Council urban planning team provided the brief for Interaction Design students in 2011, with the broad aim of enabling business and community development in the main retail centre of South Dunedin, a once industry-focused and now economically depressed suburb in this small city. The student results were so successful that students were encouraged to develop and deploy some of these concepts, through internships with the Otago Institute of Design and in partnership with community organisations. 

Student designers engaged in three types of research: field research through User Observations, social history research through the University’s Hocken Collection: Archive and Manuscripts, and community engagement through conversations at an open day held in an empty shop, and subsequent relationships with individuals and community organisations. The students presented their research through the design of urban experiences. Don Norman (2004) suggests that “Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn.” The student designers sought a particular kind of understanding, with which to form a praxis, an active process through which a theory is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realized through the creative process of designing. In this case the understanding surrounding a particular place, its social histories, and communities, is transformed.

This project was presented at the 4th International Urban Design conference in Queensland.

In 2011 I had the pleasure of working with Ngai Tahu artist Rachael Rakena and whanau on her work Haka Peepshow, commissioned by the Dunedin City Council with Ngai Tahu, within the context of the 2011 Rugby World Cup and the release of the Waitangi Tribunal Report, Wai 262, on 2 July 2011.

“Haka Peepshow is a celebration of the diversity of contemporary haka in Maori and broader New Zealand culture. In an era, when the haka is frequently a commercial branding device, this coin-operated peepshow invites viewers to take a fresh look at the haka and to consider it in the broader context of the sexualisation and commodification of Maori sportsmen and the representation of their masculinity and culture in the media.”

“Haka Peepshow is presented in a viewing booth in the form of a ‘pou’. A pou is a post, upright, support, pole, pillar, or goalpost, but it can also reference a teacher or expert. The Haka Peepshow pou also references the shape of the black ‘Rexona for Men’ aerosol deodorant – a product endorsed by the All Blacks. Five metres high with a diameter of 1.2metres, the high-gloss black pou has four ‘peepholes’ to enable viewers to look at four different haka performed by three leading exponents: Selwyn Parata, Tame Iti, Wetini Mitai-Ngatai; and two young Ngai Tahu leaders – Waiariki Parata-Taiapa and Taikawa Tamati-Elliffe.”

link to haka peepshow website 

While the Otago Settlers Museum was closed for major redevelopment in 2011 they required a temporary exhibition for the former Otago Bus Station foyer. Otago Polytechnic staff and students developed an engaging interactive exhibition involving a range of characters waiting or working at the bus station, set in the year 1942. Several interactive elements are still in use.