Exposure Exhibition: Massey University School of Design Grad Show
Exhibition Opening Hours: 10am – 4pm from 03 – 17 November
Location: Massey University, Entrance C, 63 Wallace Street and Entrance E, Tasman Street
Contact: creative@massey.ac.nz
Website: www.exposure2018.massey.ac.nz
Preview of some of the exhibiting students:
Name: Kate Bennett
Project Name: Zendo
Description: Kate’s project— Zendo —is an intuitive app helping people with endometriosis work with their bodies to better manage the illness. Through human-centered design, Zendo facilitates self-care by helping sufferers understand and manage their symptoms, making information accessible, and fostering community.
‘Karl Kane says: Kate’s Zendo project is a well-rounded concept that exudes empathy for it’s users while tackling a complex issue with maturity and warmth, underpinned by rigour at every step of her research and design process’.
Names: Rachel Bolt and Katie McKenzie
Project: Ora
Description: Rachel and Katie describe Ora as ‘a proactive approach to improving young New Zealanders’ mental health’. Ora facilitates habits that promote wellbeing accessible in everyday life, helping build self-awareness, and equipping our young people with evidence-based tools to build resilience.
‘Karl Kane says: The Ora project is among the most rigorously researched, and well refined projects to emerge from a New Zealand design school. It is no surprise that Katie and Rachel have already secured places with design teams at BNZ and Springload, respectively.
Name: Lydia Harfield
Project: Potluck
Description: Lydia’s project— Potluck —is a quarterly publication celebrating the waves of immigration that have influenced the food we eat. By facilitating storytelling through the lens of home cooking, Potluck captures small moments within the ever-changing cultural identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. The project aimed to preserve memories, traditions and unique fusions of culture that may not be captured by larger more permanent publications.
‘Karl Kane says: we grow up eating the food of our cultures, and Lydia’s project beautifully illustrates that this act becomes a part of who each of us are, as those cultures are both preserved and woven into New Zealand’s communities’
Name: Kahu Jakicevich
Project Name: A Designer’s Introduction to te Ao Māori
Description: Kahu Jakicevich hails from the East Coast, and his Honours project explored his identity and shared aspects of it with his peers. The resulting taonga— A Designer’s Introduction to te Ao Māori —acts as a tool to engage, inform and empower young non-Māori designers to more confidently make appropriate choices, and navigate tikanga when engaging with te ao Māori in their creative practice.
‘Karl Kane says: Kahu’s mahi builds upon the most heartening of insights– that ALL his peers were eager to engage more, and more appropriately, with all things toi and tikanga Māori, but many were often paralyzed by a fear of getting it ‘wrong’. His project addressed that head-on, and is a wonderfully practical tool and artefact’
Name: Sonia Mijatov
Project Name: Sammie
Description: Sammie was born out of a love for food and a curiosity for food’s origin. Sonia’s project foregrounds tangibility, interactivity and materiality in food publication design, all while celebrating the humble sandwich and starting a conversation around food sourcing. Using a tongue-in-cheek style and a focus on photography, Sammie elevates the sandwich from ‘democratic convenience food’ into a subject worthy of a long read.
‘Donald Preston says: Sonia’s project takes a seemingly singular topic, and has produced the most expansive of visual enquiries. It’s a truly gourmet slice of undergraduate design.’
Name: Josh Walker
Project Name: Spire
Description: Josh’s project— Spire —is a mobile game that employs gameful storytelling to create a playful space introducing students to good habit-building skills. By personifying player’s habits as quirky characters, Spire provides an immersive fictional world that facilitates purposeful goal setting, encourages it’s players to experiment and explore new habits, and offers an interactable experience that reflects the players personal habit building journey.
Tanya Marriott says: ‘Spire is a beautifully designed game that takes users on a journey of character engagement and world discovery, while behind the scenes players engage in healthy habit forming behaviours. Rigorously researched and play tested, Spire provides a fresh perspective to immersive character centric mobile gameplay.’
Name: Maeva de Graaf
Project Name: The Face Thief
Description: Maeva’s project— The Face Thief —is an illustrated horror book. She successfully combined an interest for, and an exploration into illustration and storytelling to create a dark, frightening tale about a face-stealing monster, and a young girl who must rescue her little brother’s face.
‘Karl Kane says: This unsettlingly dark book is a sophisticated, elegant, and wonderfully well-crafted gem; characteristics not always associated with the genre and that speak to the level of research and consideration underpinning the work’
Name: YiuTing Wong (Ting)
Project: Pedal
Description: Ting’s project— Pedal —is a multimedia interactive experience for children and their parents to understand the challenges of cycling on the road. The project promotes mutual respect in road sharing by raising the awareness of cycling safety techniques and helping drivers to feel empathy with cyclists.
‘Karl Kane says: This wonderful result reflects the mission-orientated, but media agnostic approach Ting took to the problem of road-user conflict in New Zealand. Ting’s work sets up a moment between the tool, child and parent that makes it almost impossible NOT to build respect and understanding for cyclists and the dangers they face.’
Name: Kelsey Gee
Project Name: The Kea Project
Description: Kelsey looks at how design can aid in solving complex social issues. She describes The Kea Project as ‘an exploration of reforming New Zealand’s prison’s through human-centred design.’ The Kea Project places tamariki needs first and seeks to re-humanise our prisons through an empowering and collaborative support system to better serve our ‘invisible children’: the children of prisoners.
Karl Kane says: ‘The research underpinning this project is exceptional. Engaging respectfully and effectively with stakeholders at every level, this mahi is a showcase for design research education within the undergraduate space. Kelsey has secured a role with PWC’s service design team.’
Name: Christina Kirk Wilson
Project Name: The Big Book of Māori Sounds
Description: Christina’s project is a gentle introduction into speaking te reo Māori for adults who are afraid of pronouncing Māori words incorrectly. Disguised as a children’s picture book, The Big Book of Māori sounds allows an adult to read aloud and practice their te reo while in a safe, non-confrontational space.
Karl Kane says: ‘This research asks the question: can a children’s book, written using rhyming couplets as a conduit between English (the first language) and te reo Māori (the target language) leverage the special dynamic created by reading a book to a child to facilitate language modelling’
Name: Maryam Alhaseny
Project Name: amana
Description: Maryam’s project challenges a prevalent cultural stigma, by conceiving a community where Arab youth and parents can learn, understand, and explore mental health together. The resulting artifact— amana —uses an imaginative platform to encourage self empowerment through creative therapy, allowing individuals to express themselves in any imaginable fashion.
Name: Harry Pickernell
Project Name: Ad hoc Wizdum
Description: Harry’s Project – Ad hoc Wizdum – is an open-ended investigation into the creative process. It addresses and embodies lateral methods to expand an idea of how a designer might work. Harry says a ‘frustration with his own process sparked a drive to develop a deeper understanding of design’, leading to an inquiry and application of lateral approaches to creativity. The result is an exploration of moments that seem to happen by chance, seeking to make apparent the transparent moments of his process and shift an understanding of design from something which is traditionally rigorous, to something that can also be free-flowing and malleable.
‘Lee Jensen says: Ad-hoc Wizdum rethinks the design process as an unruly beast: intuitive, discursive, a welcome home to the hunch, the glitch, the errant gesture. It embodies the potential and promise of ludic discovery, with a keen and critical eye. And paw!’
Karl Kane is a Senior Lecturer and coordinator of the final-year papers for Visual Communication Design (VCD).
Lee Jensen, Tanya Marriott and Donald Preston are Lecturers/Senior Lecturers with the School of Design and all teach into the VCD programme; Donald and Lee are part of the final-year teaching team.