In this article, we talk with Linlin Chen about Hā, an interactive wellbeing project that reimagines movement as a gentle act of restoration rather than performance.

What’s your background?
I was born in Nantong, Jiangsu, spent my high school years in Singapore, and have been in Auckland since coming here for my Bachelor of Arts in Media and Screen Studies & Communication at the University of Auckland. I’m an introvert with a stubborn need to create — and my undergrad, while it taught me to read experiences carefully, gradually made me realise I wanted to be making them. The Master of Design is where that turn became real: it lets me bring storytelling and human experience together with research-through-design, and my work has gravitated towards interactive systems, embodied experiences, and immersive technologies. Looking back, the shift from media to design feels less like a change of direction and more like an expansion of the same interest — understanding how people experience, interpret, and connect with the world around them.

Alongside design, I edit videos, something I’d been doing long before studying design, and it shapes how I treat projects: not as products, but as experiences with a beginning, middle, and end. I’m also drawn to photography, film, and creative technologies where storytelling, design, and human experience meet.

Who is your favourite designer/creative/artist and why?
I don’t really have one favourite — my taste runs more as a texture than a monument. What I find myself returning to sits between two registers: cozy, healing worlds (Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley) and high-tech, speculative ones (Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher, classic sci-fi like Gattaca and The Thirteenth Floor). The visual cultures I love — dreamcore, Y2K, Frutiger Aero, cyberpunk — share that same tension: nostalgic and futuristic at once, all asking what technology feels like emotionally. Hā lives in the same tension — a project that wants to be quieter than technology usually allows it to be, while still using it.

What goals and aspirations do you have for the future?
In the immediate term, my goal is to take Hā beyond the master’s capstone — to test the system with real users from the populations it is designed for (anxious or culturally underrepresented users, older adults with limited mobility), to extend the cultural-artwork layer through co-design with Māori artists and other communities, and to complete the desktop and VR tiers that the current mobile baseline points toward.

Looking further, I’m hoping to move into doctoral research. The questions Hā has started to surface — about positionality, accessibility, and how cultural art can be the interface of wellbeing technology rather than its decoration — feel like they want a longer engagement than a one-year capstone can give them. I’m drawn to contributing to HCI research that takes the body, culture, and emotional experience seriously, particularly for users that current digital health systems still tend to make invisible.

More broadly, I want to keep making work that takes a stance — work that argues for something about how people deserve to be treated by technology, rather than work that merely functions well. The thing that has stayed at the centre of why I make — editing, designing, writing — is the wish to create something that produces emotional resonance in another person. That is what I want to keep at the centre of whatever design I do next.

When did you first learn about your area of specialty? What about it piqued your interest?
I came into interaction design through games — playing them, especially AR and VR ones. Beat Saber and Les Mills Body Combat first showed me how strange and beautiful it is when a screen knows your body, and how much more a system can be than its interface. That sense of immersion, of technology that feels close rather than transactional, is what pulled me toward the field.

Sci-fi shaped the same instinct. I love films like Blade Runner, Gattaca, The Thirteenth Floor, and Cyberpunk 2077 — and what they share isn’t the technology itself but a question: how do humans live alongside it? I think that is exactly what design is for. As AI lowers the technical threshold and powerful tools become accessible to almost anyone, the harder question is no longer how to build but how to choose and how to use — understanding both the technology and the humans it serves.

What complicates the picture is that the cutting edge itself still costs money: VR headsets, powerful computers, fluid smartphones. A human-centred designer cannot only design for the people embracing the new tools; we also have to design for the people who can’t yet. Hā, with its mobile-first baseline, is my attempt to take that double responsibility seriously.

What’s the background of your current project?
Hā is my response to the Master of Design Capstone brief, which asked us to design for inclusive and intergenerational wellbeing in Aotearoa, looking at our cluster’s work through the three lenses of place, systems, and emerging technologies. My answer was to build a movement-and-wellbeing system for the people that mainstream fitness technology tends to render invisible — anxious users, women who avoid being watched in fitness spaces, older adults with limited mobility, people whose cultural backgrounds aren’t reflected in the apps available to them.

The system itself, Hā — te reo Māori for breath — uses a phone camera and pose detection to turn upper-body movements into the unfolding of a culturally specific scroll painting. Each held pose paints another element of the scene; over an eleven-stage sequence the user composes a landscape through their own body. Restoration replaces score. Story replaces streak. The system records nothing of the user during the session, shows them only an abstract ink-trail of their motion rather than a webcam mirror, and uses te reo Māori naming and a koru mark to anchor the work in Aotearoa through language and form rather than through borrowed Māori imagery.

What’s been interesting about building this is how often a constraint became a stance. The original concept was AR-based, but consumer phones can’t run both cameras simultaneously — so the project pivoted to mobile camera + motion capture, and the limitation became a commitment to reaching the people who use the device they already own. The motion-capture pipeline can only stably track the upper body — so seated, upper-body movement became the inclusive baseline and the home of a dedicated chair-yoga mode, instead of an afterthought.

The struggles were almost all in the iteration loop. The middle pose went through six attempts (knee lift → forward bend → wide side bend → T-pose → arms forward → finally chest-height prayer pose) before settling on something real bodies could reliably do. The particle aggregation that makes each scene element come into being through movement took four rounds of debugging. An attempted TouchDesigner audio bridge got the data pipeline working end-to-end but never reached full audio runtime; I document it as a future-work commitment rather than smooth it over.

The most interesting thing, looking back, is that none of Hā’s commitments are surface choices. They are technical decisions and methodological discipline, made visible. Tolerance, privacy, accessibility, cultural humility — each lives in code, parameters, named decisions, or an honest acknowledgement of the part that didn’t finish.

What were the catalysts/inspirations for undertaking post-grad and this particular project?
The catalyst for studying design was, oddly, the very thing I was already doing. As a Media and Screen Studies undergrad I wrote analyses of films and the work I admired, but along the way I realised that analysis wasn’t enough for me — I wanted to make the kinds of work I was learning to read. Filmmaking is collaborative and slow, so I started editing instead: re-cutting scenes from films I loved against music I loved, watching how a careful edit could make a stranger online write I felt that. That feedback was the first time I understood that my aesthetic could become a thing other people had feelings about. When I began adding graphic-design elements to those edits, the shift was already underway. Then I watched the UoA Master of Design admissions video and saw students who had come from nursing, pharmacology, every adjacent field — and I realised design might be the rare discipline that takes seriously what people from different backgrounds bring with them. I came in expecting it would be about posters, UI, products. I’m leaving with a much wider sense of what design is allowed to discuss: emotion, body culture, the future, inclusivity, women’s experience, wellbeing.

Hā itself started somewhere more conventional — I wanted to make an immersive home-fitness app, partly because I already use XR fitness apps alone at home. I’m introverted, I don’t have a car, my apartment’s gym is small, and even when I do go to one I feel the gaze. The longer I sat with that, the clearer it became that what was making it hard for me to move wasn’t laziness — it was shame, the social eye, time pressure, the feeling of not being ready to be seen. As a woman, I know these aren’t only my barriers. Meanwhile most fitness systems were still telling me More. Faster. Better. Stronger. Almost none of them were saying it’s okay to move gently. It’s okay to move for yourself. That line is where the project tilted — from fitness toward something closer to emotional restoration. I wanted movement to be a form of care.

What insight can you give us into your design process?
I work as a designer who learns by making — what HCI calls research through design. Rather than gathering evidence first and applying it afterward, I treat the prototype as the thing through which the research actually happens. Each iteration produces both a system that does something and an argument about why it does it that way. Hā in particular has gone through many cycles where what looked like a craft choice — a softer breath cadence, a wrist-trail shape, a default mode — turned out to be a stance about who the design wants to make feel welcome.

Two things have shaped my process most. The first is taking positionality seriously. I share lived experience with some of my users (international students who feel watched in fitness spaces, women navigating gendered exclusion), I have observed others firsthand (rural NZ communities I’ve spent time in), and for still others I am clearly an outsider (older adults with limited mobility — where I draw on close observation of older relatives — and Māori wāhine, where I am an outsider-designer in the strict sense). Naming the asymmetry is part of the work, not a footnote to it. Different layers of relationship call for different methodological commitments — some adopted, some respectfully deferred.

The second is being honest about what is a finding and what is a hypothesis. Because ethics approval for end-user testing sat outside this phase, I substituted projective persona scenarios — comparing each user’s as-is state with a projected to-be — and held them explicitly as design hypotheses for subsequent research to confirm, revise, or contradict. The discipline I try to keep across the whole project is: claim nothing the work has not earned, and name the parts that haven’t been earned yet.

Through your post-grad research have you made any interesting or unexpected discoveries or insights that you can share with us?
A few discoveries surprised me. The first was how often a technical constraint turned into a methodological stance. Most consumer phones can’t run both cameras at once, so AR became unfeasible — but the pivot to mobile-camera + motion-capture became a commitment to inclusion rather than a compromise. Pose detection can only stably read the upper body — so seated, upper-body movement became the inclusive baseline rather than a fallback. By the end of the project I had stopped reading my technical limitations as obstacles and started reading them as commitments waiting to be articulated.

The second was a piece of literature I expected to support my project that actually challenged it. The largest randomised controlled trial of chair-based yoga (Tew et al., 2024) found no significant improvement in mental health or quality of life, while confirming that the programme was safe, deliverable online, and cost-effective. Initially this felt like a problem. Then I realised the gap between “safe and acceptable” and “actually beneficial” was almost certainly an engagement gap — and that engagement gap is exactly what aesthetic, culturally resonant design might be able to address. A null result reframed as a design opportunity is, I think, one of the strongest things I’ve learned to do this year.

The third was simpler and quieter: body tracking is not button input. After six attempts to design a stable middle-section pose, what I came to see was that the right detection threshold isn’t exact — it’s enough. The system should be tolerant of bodies that don’t perform “right,” because the body that can’t perform an exact gesture is exactly the body the system is for.

What has been the most challenging part of your research thus far? How did you overcome it, or are you still working to resolve it?
The hardest moment in the project so far was the AR pivot. I had built the early concept on a vision of augmented reality in the user’s room — front camera tracking the body, back camera overlaying the scroll painting onto the actual space. The longer I worked with the idea, the more clearly I saw that consumer phones overwhelmingly cannot run both cameras at once. My technical advisor confirmed it. The choice came down to: keep the most impressive version of the project and quietly exclude most of the users it was meant for, or let go of AR. I let go of AR. Reading Mandic et al.’s (2023) work on pose tracking from a single mobile camera was what made the pivot possible — it preserved the most valuable capability the AR direction offered (shame-free, spatial feedback) while shedding the hardware that excluded my users. It still took a few weeks to stop mourning the version I had abandoned. But that pivot is now what the rest of the project’s commitments are built on.

The unresolved challenge is the Māori cultural-art layer I want the system to eventually host. I do not have the right to bring Māori artistic forms into the artwork layer without co-design with mana whenua and engagement with mātauranga Māori, and that work is not something a one-year master’s capstone can responsibly attempt on its own. I name it openly in the report as a future-methods commitment, not as a delivered feature — but it remains the part of the project I am most aware of not yet having done.

How has post-grad study impacted your design practice?
Post-grad study has changed what I think design is, not just what I think it does. I came in with a fairly conventional sense of the discipline — posters, UI, products — and I am leaving with a much wider understanding of what design is allowed to discuss: emotion, body culture, the future, inclusivity, women’s experience, wellbeing. That widening has changed the way I work.

Practically, the biggest shift is that I now treat making as a way of producing knowledge, not just a way of delivering it. Research through design has become my methodological home — prototypes are where the actual research happens, and each iteration is both a system and an argument about why the system is the way it is. The other shift is around honesty. I have learned to distinguish between findings and hypotheses, to name what I have and have not earned, and to take positionality seriously — to be precise about whose lived experience I share, whose I have only observed, and where I am clearly an outsider-designer.

The deepest impact, though, is more quiet. Post-grad has made me see that the best moments of a design project often come from being honest about a limit. The constraints that look like obstacles — a technical pivot, a population I cannot represent, a feature that didn’t fully run — turn out, more often than not, to be the places where the project’s commitments become legible. I am leaving the master’s with a much firmer sense that design is an ethical practice as much as a craft one.

Why did you choose this particular program/university/qualification?
I chose the Master of Design at the University of Auckland for a few reasons that aligned at once. The most immediate was that I was already in Auckland — I’d completed my undergrad in Media and Screen Studies & Communication at UoA, and staying meant I could carry that grounding forward rather than starting from scratch elsewhere. The deeper reason was the kind of design education the program seemed to offer. When I watched the admissions video and saw students who had come from nursing, pharmacology, and every adjacent field, I realised this was a program that did not require a “traditional” design background — it actively wanted what people from different fields brought with them. That mattered to me. As someone coming from media analysis rather than from a craft-based undergraduate, I needed a program that would treat my prior training as material, not as a deficit.

What I have found in the program is even closer to what I was looking for than I expected. The Master of Design is organised around social themes — wellbeing, inclusive places, financial systems — and asks students to address them through real research-through-design work. That framing made room for me to design for people, with all their cultural, emotional, and bodily complexity, rather than to design objects in isolation. It is the framing in which a project like Hā could exist; I’m not sure it could have happened in a more conventional design program.

Socials
Website
LinkedIn
Instagram
Video editing channel

Acknowledgments
Aaron Fry (Supervisor, University of Auckland), Aldo (Technical Advisor, University of Auckland), and Yilin Ke (Doctoral Researcher whose work on invisible users in digital health informed the theoretical framing).

The post From the Edges — Hā — Movement as Ritual Repair – By Linlin Chen appeared first on Design Assembly.

In this article, we talk with Qianying Li about her PhD research project on ‘Woven Silence’.

Talk to us about your background in design and the path you took to get where you are now?

I am from a small city in southwest China named Nanchong. Because my parents valued education and supported my ambition, I had the opportunity to study in New Zealand. This year marks my tenth year in Auckland. I started at AUT as a student , and became a PhD researcher and creative practitioner here.

During my undergraduate studies, I began combining poetry with visual communication design, exploring the relationship between poem and image. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I became stranded in China after an international exchange programme. The repeated periods of isolation between China and New Zealand led me to think about how design could carry personal narratives and social experience.

After completing my undergraduate and master’s studies, I gradually realised that conversations about age, marriage, and childbirth were increasingly common at family gatherings and in everyday interactions. I was living what they call 剩女/ Shèng Nü (leftover women), and that pressure became the heart of my creative work, explored through poetry, image-making, and silk.

I am currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at AUT, using the Chinese concept of 变通 / Bian Tong (adaptive-transformative thinking) as a creative strategy to explore the relationship between women, culture, and society.

*Bian Tong emphasises understanding and responding to change and adjusting actions according to shifting circumstances.

Who is your favourite designer/creative/artist and why?

There are many artists and creatives I admire, but the person who has influenced me most is the Tang dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei (王维, 699–759 CE). Although almost none of Wang Wei’s original paintings survive, the Song dynasty poet Su Shi famously said that Wang Wei put painting into his poetry and poetry into his painting. This fusion became central to Chinese literati painting.

What attracts me is this understanding of poetry and painting as interconnected forms of expression. Through Wang Wei’s influence, I began to see creative practice as a space for emotional exchange, reflection on society, and thought.

This relationship between poetry and image continues to shape my practice. Sometimes a poem changes the direction of an image, while at other times an image leads me back to rewriting the poem itself. For me, there is a tension between text and image that continually pushes them further apart.

What goals and aspirations do you have for the future?

In the future, I hope to continue creating work from a female designer’s perspective, focusing on gender roles and women’s experiences in contemporary China while integrating traditional Chinese thought into design practice.

Through years of cross-cultural study, I have become increasingly aware that many understandings of Chinese culture and Chinese women are shaped by stereotypes. Many times, when I tried to explain the term 剩女/ leftover women to Western friends, I realised how different their understanding was from the realities of the Chinese social context.

I hope my work makes the experience of 剩女/ leftover women tangible for people who haven’t lived it, creating understanding across cultural boundaries. I want my work to make the 剩女/ leftover women experience real for people who haven’t lived it, and accessible to audiences across cultures. Design, for me, is about creating dialogue that crosses boundaries.

When did you first learn about your area of specialty? What about it piqued your interest?

I first became interested in combining poetry and visual practice during a university project in my second year of undergraduate study. It began as a small experiment, but it unexpectedly changed the direction of my creative practice.

English is not my first language, and as an international student, I often felt I had to constantly overcome language barriers. I found it difficult to communicate complex emotions and experiences entirely through English, and equally difficult to make others fully understand what I was trying to express.

I gradually realised that some emotions which were difficult to express directly became easier to communicate once they were written as poetry and translated into images. The ambiguity and metaphor within poetry also created a tension with the directness of visual language.

Since then, the relationship between poetry and image has remained central to my practice

What’s the background of your current project?

My PhD project explores the experiences of leftover women in contemporary China. The project is being developed through three installation series, using image-making and poetry on silk as its primary media.

In both public discourse and media representation, the label of leftover women is often tied to the stigmatisation of women and framed through gender opposition. Rather than responding through confrontation, I wanted to approach the subject more subtly through poetry, images, and materials.

My generation of Chinese women is the first generation to experience greater access to higher education and independent careers on a larger scale. I grew up watching more women gain education, careers, and independence, while traditional expectations surrounding marriage and femininity often remained unchanged. This tension gradually became the foundation of the project.

While the phenomenon of leftover women has been discussed within sociology and media studies, it remains relatively underexplored within art and design practice. Through this project, I hope to create a softer yet still critical approach to the subject.

What were the catalysts/inspirations for undertaking post-grad and this particular project?

Before beginning my master’s degree, I was not entirely sure what I truly wanted to pursue. Postgraduate study gave me the space to continue exploring, while Dreams of a Solo Traveller was the project that helped me recognise a clear direction within my practice.

Choosing to continue into a PhD was because I gradually became certain about the questions I wanted to keep investigating.

The topic of leftover women emerged from personal experience. One summer a few years ago, I reunited with close friends I had known for years. We found ourselves discussing how, as unmarried and childless women of a certain age, we had already begun planning for retirement on our own. It was a real conversation about our lives.

Living and studying in the West led me to reconsider many of these expectations from a different perspective. This contrast between cultures prompted me to ask what kinds of social and gendered pressures contemporary educated Chinese women are currently navigating.

What insight can you give us into your design process?

My research is practice-led, and the idea of Bian Tong has gradually become a way of working within my creative process.

Usually, I begin with poetry and then translate the poems into ink-based imagery and visual work. However, the process is never fixed. Sometimes I write many poems but still cannot find a way into the visual work; at other times, a trace within an ink painting leads me back to language. When one direction no longer works, I change approach: I move into image-making first and then return to poetry through the visual process.

Over time, this ongoing process of adjustment and transition gradually became the way I work within the project. It is influenced by Chinese ideas of change, timing, and adaptability found within texts such as the 易经/Yijing, 鬼谷子/Guiguzi, and 孙子兵法/The Art of War.

Through your post-grad research have you made any interesting or unexpected discoveries or insights that you can share with us?

Before beginning this research, I had never seriously considered silk as a creative material, even though I was born in a city with a thousand-year history of silk production.

Over time, I realised that silk does not simply function as a surface for images. It also changes how viewers approach the work itself. Compared with canvas or paper, silk offers a softer, more indirect approach to the subject. When viewers encounter the texture of silk, they are already entering a particular perceptual state, and that state itself becomes part of what the work communicates.

This led me to reconsider the role of material within my practice: materials participate in storytelling.

What has been the most challenging part of your research thus far? How did you overcome it, or are you still working to resolve it?

One of the biggest challenges within my research is that many of its core ideas are rooted in specific Chinese cultural and linguistic contexts, making them difficult to translate directly.

In many cases, there are no exact English equivalents for these concepts. Even my own poetry exists in both Chinese and English versions, yet the two can never fully mirror one another.

At first, I kept trying to find an accurate translation. Over time, however, complete equivalence may not actually be the goal. I became more interested in whether they could carry similar emotions and experiences.

How has post-grad study impacted your design practice?

Before postgraduate study, my practice relied on intuition and aesthetic judgement.

Practice-led research training encouraged me to think systematically about the relationship between design, knowledge, and creative practice. Over time, I developed a clearer understanding of research methods, knowledge production, and the role of process within creative work.

Intuition is no longer the only basis for decision-making. Research training taught me to pause and ask why I make certain decisions.

Why did you choose this particular program/university/qualification?

After nearly ten years of study in New Zealand, AUT has become connected to both my academic and personal growth.

During the pandemic, when border closures prevented me from returning to New Zealand, my supervisors and the international office remained in contact with me and helped me find ways to continue my studies. My supervisors consistently believed in my potential as a researcher and creative practitioner, even during periods when I was least certain of it myself. That support meant a great deal to me.

At the same time, AUT has given me a high degree of creative freedom, allowing me to explore a research direction that belongs to my practice and personal interests. Living and studying between two cultures has also allowed me to reconsider my cultural background from different perspectives.

Socials:
LinkedIn

The post From the Edges — Woven Silence – By Qianying Li from Auckland University of Technology, AUT appeared first on Design Assembly.

Your work sits between architecture, urban design, wayfinding, and fabrication. How would you describe the role of experiential graphic design in shaping how people move through and experience a space?

I see the role of experiential graphic design as amplifying what’s already there rather than imposing something new. Every space I work with already has layers of intentional intervention—architecture, urban design, landscape architecture—each informed by research, problem-solving, and ideation. My work isn’t additive in isolation; it builds on this foundation. 

What I do is extract and enhance the ideas already embedded in a space, then translate them into legible cues for people moving through it. Sometimes that’s a beacon that creates orientation; sometimes it’s contextual information that enriches understanding. The goal is to help people extract more meaning and clarity from the place they’re in.

Of course, context shapes everything. An airport demands different strategies than a theater or a park—each has its own logic, rhythm, and relationship to the visitor. That specificity is where the work becomes interesting.

In your upcoming talk at Sign & Print Expo 2026, you mention “connecting the dots” between bold visions and human-centred environments. What does that process look like in practice?

People move through public space in fundamentally different ways. Some know exactly where they’re going. Others are searching for something specific. Some are deliberately wandering, even in familiar places. Experiential graphic design has to hold all of these simultaneously—any intervention I add needs to “read the room” and understand what people need.

That’s why I frame myself as an experiential graphic urbanist. It gives me permission to sit at the intersection of two conversations: the bold, large-scale visions established at masterplan level, and the granular, human-centered needs that actually determine whether a space works. Accessibility, legibility, readability—these aren’t afterthoughts or constraints. They’re how vision becomes inhabitable.

The work is translation. I take the conceptual ambitions of a masterplan and ask: How does this feel to move through? What does someone actually need to understand this place? That’s where experiential graphic urbanism connects the dots—between the architect’s vision and the visitor’s experience.

What are some of the most overlooked elements when designing for readability, accessibility, and intuitive user experience within public spaces?

A sign works best when it’s in the right place at the right time—which is far harder than it sounds. Path and node diagrams help us map decision points, but they’re a starting framework, not a prescription. Just because there’s a node doesn’t mean there needs to be a sign there.

What actually matters is occupying that node yourself. Standing where a visitor would stand, understanding what’s visible in their field of view—that determines whether intervention is needed at all. Sometimes the architecture speaks clearly enough. Sometimes the architecture is the problem. I often remind architects: we might be calling this a wayfinding issue, but it’s actually an architecture problem. The best solution is a building that minimizes wayfinding needs entirely, or makes them irrelevant.

Once a location is confirmed and we’re placing information, accessibility becomes critical. New Zealand’s building codes are relatively permissive compared to other countries, but there’s solid evidence—quantifiable, research-backed—about what people with low vision, dyslexia, and ADHD can actually process. It’s our job as designers to advocate for that.

And yet, the simplest things get overlooked repeatedly: line length and type size. I’m still surprised how often these basics are mishandled, even though they’re foundational to readability.

Wayfinding is often something people only notice when it fails. What makes great wayfinding design feel seamless and natural?

You can never help everyone all the time, but you can help most people most of the time. That’s the starting point.

Early in a project, user research establishes a destination hierarchy—what actually matters to the majority of users. That’s where the focus goes. If departure gates are critical, they must work flawlessly. The next tier of information follows, then the next, until you reach a threshold where adding more stops working entirely. It becomes cognitive overload.

The subtle art is knowing when to stop. It’s about saying no—being rigorous enough to exclude information that seems important  but isn’t actually serving the user. But wayfinding doesn’t exist in isolation. The graphic system is just one layer in a much larger sensory ecosystem. You might hear the café before you see the sign for it. You might smell food, or catch the ambient sound of a busy concourse. These cues are working alongside the wayfinding, reinforcing it, sometimes doing the heavy lifting themselves. A well-designed space lets all of these elements work together—the signage steps back because the architecture, the acoustics, the sensory landscape are already orienting you.

Restraint is what makes wayfinding feel seamless. The moment it feels like too much, it stops being helpful and becomes noise.

How do you balance visual identity and brand expression with the practical function of helping people navigate spaces confidently and comfortably?

The job of wayfinding is to guide and strengthen the experience—which ultimately adds to the brand. But that’s different from wayfinding’s job being to display brand identity.

Brand is bigger than the building kit. It’s the idea, the promise of the place itself. When I’m moving through a space, I need to experience that promise, not see it represented. I don’t need the visual identity reinforced at every touchpoint. Some cohesion helps—a considered link—but I think less overt branding through visual identity in wayfinding, and more emphasis on how the space behaves as a reflection of the bigger brand idea, actually creates a stronger overall brand experience. Nomenclature, tone, and feel do much more heavy lifting than visual elements borrowed from the brand identity.

This is where I expect the conversation will go with Emme Jacob from There at Sign & Print Expo 2026: How do you build brand through experience rather than visual repetition? How do you let a space speak for itself? It’s a fundamental tension in environmental design—and it’s where wayfinding and brand strategy actually need to be in conversation from the beginning, not bolted together at the end.

Are there any projects you’ve worked on that particularly shifted the way you think about urban experience and human-centred design?

Every project shifts my thinking about human-centered design—that’s the nature of the work. But honestly, getting older has been equally instructive. I wish I could say that empathy alone was enough, but it’s not. I’ve always thought about accessibility, but I wasn’t truly concerned about it until I experienced reduced vision myself.

I think design education should prioritize this over the usual creativity exercises. Every design student should spend a day navigating the world through various vision impairments—simulated low vision, color blindness, tunnel vision—just to understand the stakes when they’re twenty. Sit in a wheelchair. Move through a space the way someone with mobility challenges has to. These aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re the difference between designing for people and designing with understanding.

This kind of embodied learning should be foundational, not optional. Once you’ve experienced a space from that perspective, you can’t unsee the problems. And you won’t accept mediocre solutions anymore.

Technology continues to influence how people interact with environments. How do you see digital experiences changing the future of wayfinding and experiential design?

I’m old enough to remember when people said print was dead—that the internet would make everything digital. Well, that didn’t happen. Print didn’t die. If anything, the sheer volume of books being published—especially with self-publishing and print-on-demand—has exploded far beyond what existed when the internet went public.

I think wayfinding and experiential graphic design are becoming more relevant, not less, as people seek real experiences away from devices. Yes, a maps app can plot the fastest route from A to B. Your watch can tap your wrist to give you direction change hints as you walk through the city. But you also have a choice: navigate by looking around, reading visual cues, following signs, consulting a city wayfinding map. It’s more engaging. It feels human again.

There’s a place for both. Sometimes, when time is critical, I let the device take over. But I just spent two weeks in London—a city I know reasonably well—and I found myself deliberately leaning into the Legible London system instead. In moments of uncertainty, there’s something pleasing and satisfying about reading a physical map, about choosing your own route. The device gives you efficiency. The environment gives you agency.

That’s the future I’m interested in—physical wayfinding offering a genuine experience in a world saturated with screens.

What role does materiality, signage production, and fabrication play in bringing these environments to life successfully?

Materiality is the most important thing. It’s what a digital screen—in our hand or on a wall—can’t offer. It’s what transforms the pragmatic requirement of information in the environment into something experiential.

Material choices tell a narrative. They build on the architectural palette we discussed earlier. They create texture, weight, presence—things that exist in the world, not behind glass. That’s where the real work happens.

And you can’t do this alone. You need great fabricators—people who understand how materials behave, how things can be beautifully built. They’re drawing on everything from traditional sign-writing techniques to contemporary digital fabrication. The expertise matters. An idea stays an idea until a skilled maker translates it into reality, and that translation—understanding the grain of wood, the finish of metal, the way light catches a surface—is what brings these spaces to life.

For designers interested in moving into experiential graphic design or wayfinding, what skills or ways of thinking do you think are most valuable?

You need three foundational strengths: great typography, strong spatial understanding, and the ability to design with materials in three dimensions. But the real skill is drawing from across multiple design fields.

Study the key bits of visual communication—how information hierarchy works, how to communicate clearly. Study industrial design—how objects function, how materials behave, tolerances, production constraints. Study spatial design—how people move through environments, how scale and proportion affect experience. It’s not about becoming an expert in each. It’s about understanding how they intersect.

A wayfinding system with beautiful typography but no spatial awareness will fail. One with great spatial thinking but poor typography will confuse people. One designed without material understanding will look cheap or fall apart.

Assuming you are a Visual Communication Designer working in teams clarifies your role—the architects and urban designers you’ll work with are spatially sharp—they understand form, scale, how spaces work. Where they often trip up is typography, visual rhetoric, semiotics. That’s where you bring value. Understanding those fields gives you a language to speak with architects on equal footing, and it clarifies your role: you’re not decorating their work, you’re translating spatial ideas into legible communication.

The most valuable skill might be this: Learn to see holistically. Don’t design a sign. Design how a sign sits in a space, how people encounter it, what it’s made of, what it communicates. That integration—visual, spatial, material, functional—is what separates good wayfinding from great wayfinding.

Most wayfinding designers emerge from one starting field—Visual Communication, Industrial Design, or Spatial Design—with a foundational strength. Your job is adding the other bits. As you reach into adjacent design fields, you pull out the parts most required for wayfinding.

What are you most looking forward to sharing with attendees at the 2026 Sign & Print Expo?

All of this—but particularly the challenge of bilingual wayfinding and what that means in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.

It’s a conversation that goes beyond design technique. It’s about language, identity, and how we honor the stories embedded in a place. Bilingual wayfinding isn’t just about fitting two languages into the same space—it’s about deciding which language leads, how they coexist, what visual weight each carries. Those are cultural and political decisions, not just design ones.

In Aotearoa, we’re at an interesting moment. Te Reo Māori is resurgent. More and more public spaces are embracing bilingual signage. But the how—the design, the hierarchy, the material expression—still matters enormously. Get it right, and you strengthen both languages and the relationship between them. Get it wrong, and you inadvertently reinforce the very hierarchies you’re trying to challenge.

That’s what I’m looking forward to exploring with attendees: how wayfinding becomes an act of cultural respect, not just information design. How the choices we make as designers ripple outward in ways we don’t always see.

Come along to the Sign & Print Expo on 17 June at Auckland Showgrounds to hear Nick sharing his insights on wayfinding design live on stage. Entry is free!

Register to attend Expo
Register for the Wayfinding Speaker Session

The post Sign & Print Expo: Nick Kapica on Wayfinding, Urban Experience and Human-Centred Design appeared first on Design Assembly.

How is AI changing the way ideas emerge, evolve, and circulate?

The Life Cycle of an Idea (Under AI) is an ethics-approved research project exploring how AI is reshaping creative practice, authorship, decision-making, and the evolution of ideas.

We are an international, interdisciplinary research team working across design, creative practice, education, and technology. We are seeking expressions of interest from artists, designers, technologists, educators, and makers.

If AI is influencing your practice in some way, whether through adoption, resistance, uncertainty, experimentation, or critique, we’d love to hear from you.

Participants will contribute to a growing international conversation examining authorship, experimentation, decision-making, collaboration, and creative labour in an AI-mediated environment.

More information and the Expression of Interest form can be found via the project website here: https://www.lifecycleofanidea.com/

Ethics approval granted by the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Ethics Committee (Reference 25/311).

This project is supported by AUT, Contiguous, and split/fountain.

The post Press Release: The Lifecycle Of An Idea – By Auckland University of Technology, split/fountain, Contiguous appeared first on Design Assembly.

If you’ve been part of the Design Assembly community before, there’s a good chance you still think of yourself as a member. And honestly, we still think of you as part of the community too.

Over the years, thousands of creatives across Aotearoa have attended DA events, shared work through the platform, joined Coffee Clubs, submitted projects, read articles, or simply stayed connected to the wider creative conversation through Design Assembly. But memberships can quietly lapse over time while life and work get busy.

With the launch of the new Design Club, we’ve been reconnecting with past members and realised many people may not know their membership has expired.

So this is your gentle reminder to double check.

You can view our current Design Club member listings here:
https://designassembly.org.nz/our-design-club-members/

The Design Club is about ongoing connection to the creative community across Aotearoa. Membership includes access to monthly Coffee Clubs, member discounts and selected free event tickets, opportunities to profile yourself and your work, free submissions to Fresh From The Field, Five Minutes With…, A Solo Session, From Inside the Club, and press releases, as well as job listings and ongoing visibility within the industry.

Most importantly, membership helps support our platform dedicated to connecting, supporting, and celebrating design in Aotearoa New Zealand.

As part of our current launch campaign, anyone joining or rejoining the Design Club before the end of June will also receive a complimentary 1:1 mentor session with Louise Kellerman, Mark Easterbrook, or Rosie Holt.

So if you’ve been meaning to reconnect, this might be your sign.

We still love you. Come back to The Club.

The post Love Design? We’d Love to Welcome You Back to The Club! appeared first on Design Assembly.

The new exhibitions feature works by Allan McDonald, Bahar Noorizadeh, Brendan Kitto, Ilish Thomas, Pao Houa Her, and Sonic Hapori. → Allan McDonald presents Western Line 2003, a photographic series documenting the “terrain vague” of railway margins as a counter-response to the widespread commodification of Tāmaki Makaurau in the 2000s. This work is presented at the Te Tuhi Billboards at Parnell Station.

→ Bahar Noorizadeh presents Free to Choose, an operatic financial sci-fi (“fi-fi”) set in 2047 Hong Kong that reimagines the credit banking system as a time-travelling machine, diffracting the fictions of market liberalism to propose another time and space in which anything is possible.

→ Brendan Kitto presents 14 miles north-east, a photographic series documenting the shifting landscapes of Pakuranga and Howick as the artist revisits overlooked suburban memories and the collective emotions beneath the surface of urban sprawl. This work will be presented at the Te Tuhi Reeves Road Billboards and Te Tuhi’s Project Wall.

→ Ilish Thomas presents The Crystal Palace, a video-installation work tracing the site of the former Crystal Palace Theatre in Maungawhau to revisit the haunting nature of property ownership through the spectral presence of the chudel from Gujarati folklore.

→ Pao Houa Her presents Kwv Txhiaj in the Valley of Widows, a video work exploring Hmong song poetry as a storytelling technology that navigates the complexities of diaspora, memory, and the “eternal community” in the wake of personal and collective loss.

→ Sonic Hapori presents Rona, a formative installation that reframes the pūrākau of Rona
as a radical symbol of fortitude and sound-based reimagining, evolving from a celestial connection into a staunch sound system at Te Tuhi.

Opening event:
4-6 pm Saturday 23 May 2026 – everyone is welcome to join in celebrating with the artists and the Te Tuhi. All the exhibitions will run until Sunday 19 July 2026.

Western Line 2003 | Allan McDonald (Aotearoa NZ)

The images in Western Line 2003 were captured during a period when Allan McDonald was a frequent user of the train service. He describes the areas surrounding the tracks at that time as a form of terrain vague (1), which functioned as a semi-wild, unmonitored zone where young people would gather, do their thing, and simply hang out. During that era, Tāmaki was undergoing widespread commodification, forcing these “urban gaps” to seek their own means of survival. Having long documented the traces within spaces marginalized by urban development and changing environments, McDonald presents landscapes that offer a response both opposite and somehow strangely similar to the transformations of that time.
(1) Terrain vague: A concept proposed by architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales, referring to abandoned or derelict urban spaces that lack a clear identity or function.

About the Artist
Allan McDonald is a lecturer in photography at Unitec, Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka. He works with an archive of images spanning more than 50 years from which he curates narratives of social history and place. These often appear as small publications, most recently Between the Silence and the Flame 2016, Carbon Empire, 2017, The Holding 2020 and Viewshaft 2024. Carbon Empire won the New Zealand Photobook of the Year Award. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Chartwell Collection.

Free to Choose | Bahar Noorizadeh (Iran/Canada)

Free to Choose is an operatic financial sci-fi (fi-fi), narrated by Milton Friedman, in which we encounter the credit banking system as a time-travelling machine. In 1997, in post-economic crash Hong Kong, Philip Tose, ex-race car driver and CEO of an
insolvent company, travels to the future to borrow a lump sum from his older self and rescue his business. Hong Kong in 2047 turns out not to be very different from the Hong Kong of “One Country, Two systems”. Centralisation has not eradicated nepotism, and activism has become rating activism: young people advocating for free time travel for everyone, including
the untrustworthy and the discredited of a corrupt credit system. In the background is superstar economist and real-life evangelist Milton Friedman’s myth of neoliberalism as represented by Hong Kong: in his long career as a market ideologue and
advisor to the conservative governments of the US and the UK, Friedman hailed the city as the modern exemplar of free markets, needless of heavy-handed government planning and control. “If you want to see Capitalism in action, you should go to Hong Kong.” Much like the economic worlds built in metaverse and gaming platforms today, Hong Kong was the testing ground for the parable of neoliberalism. Once certified in its advanced colony, neoliberalism would return to shape the economic policies of Western powers in the decades to come. Despite once claiming the highest rate of public housing in the world, Hong Kong now holds one of the deepest wealth gaps and one of the most lucrative real estate markets on the planet.

About the Artist
In her practice as an artist, theorist and filmmaker, Bahar Noorizadeh examines the relationship between art and capitalism. Her work examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they collapse into one another, investigating the histories and the futures of economics as well as activist strategies against the financialisation of life, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder and organiser of Weird Economies. Her work has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum NYC (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennial (2021), Transmediale Festival (2020, 2022), among others. She teaches in MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is a resident artist at the Rijksakademie (2026-2027).

14 miles north-east | Brendan Kitto (Aotearoa NZ)

Near the end of 1993, Brendan Kitto’s family moved from Whanganui to Auckland. Before the final relocation, Kitto’s father commuted between the two cities, and Kitto often visited his father’s office in Newmarket. To a twelve-year-old boy from Whanganui, visiting the “Big Smoke” was no different from an overseas trip. By familiarising himself with the fast pace of
Newmarket and the bustle of Auckland’s CBD, he eased the apprehension of leaving his familiar hometown.
However, the family eventually settled in Pakuranga, an eastern suburb of Auckland. Kitto recalls that it felt “as though I had moved a second time.” Pakuranga is only 22 kilometres southeast of the Auckland city centre, yet its atmosphere felt quite different. It retained palpable colonial foundations and lacked a distinct urban character. Consequently, he spent his youth with little interest in the suburb that had become his home. As urban sprawl intensified, Kitto began to photographically document the increasingly unsettled areas of Howick and Pakuranga, rediscovering both the current transformations and the landscapes he had overlooked for decades. Through the photographs in 14 miles north-east, he revisits unseen memories and the unresolvable personal and collective emotions that lie beneath the surface of the images.

About the Artist
Brendan Kitto’s photography is a bridge between the visual and the conceptual, offering a window into the intertwined stories of time, place, social commentary, and human connection. His images provoke thought, stir emotions, and remind us that within the urban sprawl and the natural serenity, there are stories waiting to be told. Through his lens, Brendan captures the essence of the world we live in, encouraging us to explore the deeper layers of our surroundings and our shared human experiences.

The Crystal Palace | Ilish Thomas (Aotearoa NZ)

The Crystal Palace traces the site of The Crystal Palace Theatre in Maungawhau, Tāmaki Makaurau. The artist Ilish Thomas’s grandfather purchased a stake in this theatre in the 1970s, now, two generations later, the cinema has been consigned to oblivion amidst urbanisation and the burgeoning discourse of property possession. Thomas’s film captures the interior and exterior of the theatre alongside the chudel, a female ghost from Gujarati folklore. A voice, sounding like a shadow of the past and a phantom of the future, asks the chudel for the way in. Like a beam of light emanating from a projector, the chudel wanders through the theatre, projecting herself onto the empty seats and overlapping with the building itself. Through the figure of the chudel, who in folklore often suffers a tragic death and returns to seek retribution against surviving kin through property or finances, Thomas revisits the haunting nature of ‘property possession.’ Mirroring the chime that opened the video, at the end of the film, a sudden chime of a bell resonates like an awakening from the dream of cinema, leaving a lingering echo in our ears as it vanishes along with the chudel.

*The Crystal Palace was originally commissioned by The Physics Room, November 2025, and is presented at
Te Tuhi in May 2026 as an expanded installation, with thanks to Jane Wallace and The Physics Room.

About the Artist
Ilish Thomas is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, whose practice explores the complexity of South Asian diasporic identity through themes of whakapapa, memory, grief, loss, and belonging. Working across textiles, video, audio, and other archival strategies, they engage modes of storytelling and oral histories as tools for cultural navigation and mediation. Central
to her work is a focus on ‘in-betweenness’ and of generating new political imaginaries.

Kwv Txhiaj in the Valley of Widows | Pao Houa Her (Laos/USA)

Pao Houa Her’s Kwv Txhiaj (pronounced kue-chee-ah) refers to Hmong song poetry. It is a Hmong oral tradition and a storytelling technology. Originally performed in pairs as a call-and-response, it takes an extemporaneous form. Rooted in ancient courtship rites, this song poetry is also performed for occasions such as commemoration, healing, and moral teaching
within the community. At times, audiences may even suggest themes for the song poetry. This improvisational nature inevitably carries a sense of uniqueness. The duration of a performance is variable and can last for hours depending on the will of the song poet who initiates it.
Throughout modern and contemporary history, kwv txhiaj has been appropriated multiple times. Following the immeasurable loss of Hmong males conscripted to resist communism in Vietnam during the Cold War, a thriving kwv txhiaj audio cassette industry emerged among survivors in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, a travel documentary VHS industry appeared, offering guided tours of the teb chaw (pronounced tay-chaw which translated as land-place) to Hmong diasporas traveling to Laos. Her remembers these VHS tours playing in her family’s living room in St. Paul, Minnesota. Between the narrated collages of sacred and secular landscapes, kwv txhiaj flowed as a soundtrack.
Passing through the isolation of the pandemic, this song poetry began to be performed even more actively within the Hmong community-especially among the younger generation-through social media platforms by rappers and classical voice practitioners. Near the end of the pandemic, the sudden death of Her’s spouse gave kwv txhiaj a different meaning for her.
In this way, Kwv Txhiaj touches upon Pao Houa Her’s sense of eternal community, a land that can never be permanently reconnected, and people with whom a meeting cannot be promised. In the video, the performers continue their response without facing each other.

The combination of melodic lines, mono-syllabic words, and individual breaths creates a tonal play that conveys a singular musical emotion, reaching even those who do not speak Hmong.

About the Artist
Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist. Her’s artwork is rooted in stories of migration, desire, and belonging. Through photography, video, and site-specific installation, Her stays attentive to the shifting nature of memory, multi-directional time, and simultaneous truths related to Hmong intergenerational and transnational experiences. With trickster intention,
she addresses colonial histories and aesthetics to rescript authenticity and representation. Her’s recent solo presentations include the institutional survey The Imaginative Landscape, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, and San José Museum of Art, CA (2025–26); The Modern Window: Pao Houa Her, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (2024–25); Nim ye, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis (2024); and Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2022–23). Upcoming and recent group exhibitions include After the Monsoon: Art & War in Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore (2026); Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA, and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024–26); Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, KADIST, San Francisco, CA (2024–25); The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2022); and Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept, NYC (2022). Her work is collected by KADIST, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MAIIAM, National Gallery of Art, Singapore Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

Rona | Sonic Hapori (Aotearoa NZ)

As the pūrākau goes, Rona was a wahine of great mana. One night when the moon was full, she went to fill her tahā with water. On her way down the path, a cloud passed over Rakaunui, casting a shadow over her path. Rona fell and cursed te Marama. Filled with rage, te Marama snatched her from Papatūānuku. With her tahā in one hand, she reached out for a ngaio tree nearby. When the moon is full, you can see Rona holding her tahā and clinging to the ngaio tree, listening to fat dubs.

“Kia mahara ki te hē o Rona”
“Remember the fault of Rona”

Here we celebrate Rona and her fortitude to break rules, remembering her hē as a tohu for radical imaginings. Over the time of Matariki, she evolves from a tahā suspended from te orokohanga with an umbilical cord of raupō connecting her to a pito of sound seen as a speaker, into a staunch sound system that will be listening to you until she’s ready to sing.

Public Programme
Saturday 11 July, 5 – 7pm at Te Tuhi

The programme begins by taking Rona outside to the courtyard in the evening light. Amidst sonics and cool lighting, the group shares a story time and gives a talk of the experience. As a collective of people navigating the space, participants re-imagine sound systems and reframe the dynamic of space through sound. The session concludes by experiencing a large sound sculpture, leading to a religious experience or signal.

About the Artist
Sonic Hapori is a collective of artists based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working within the intersection of art and sound. Its current members include Anahera Jade, Ilish Thomas, Mariam Tawfik, and Milika Swann.

About Te Tuhi
Te Tuhi is a leading platform for contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a programme consciously and continually shaped towards rigorous, adventurous and socially engaged artistic experimentation. Te Tuhi’s primary focus is on commissioning both national and international artists to make new work by creating stimulating contexts for artists to respond to and work within.

Te Tuhi presents work in its galleries in Pakuranga and Parnell, around Auckland and Aotearoa, internationally and online. Te Tuhi offers artists and curators opportunities to develop their practice through studios, awards, residencies and internships both in Aotearoa and overseas. Integrated with its exhibitions, Te Tuhi provides public programmes for general audiences and for schools.

Te Tuhi has been embedded in its local community for 50 years, delivering arts and cultural experiences for schools, young people, community groups and people of all backgrounds and ages. Arts Out East is Te Tuhi’s community arts brokering programme for the Howick Local Board area in East Auckland. Te Tuhi also operates Te Taiwhanga Taiohi, East Auckland’s Youth Space in Botany Town Centre. Te Tuhi’s building in Pakuranga hosts a vast range of independent community groups.

Images for media use can be found via our dropbox here.

Te Tuhi
21 William Roberts Road, Pakuranga 2010
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
tetuhi.art | @tetuhiart

Press contact
Sophie Dale
sophie@brownbread.co.nz

The post 2026 Press Release: Te Tuhi May Exhibitions 22 May 2026 appeared first on Design Assembly.

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.

The brief

In support of Auckland Transport’s intention to encourage active travel – and embed climate resilience in the future fabric of the city – Maynard has designed a dynamic system of modular cycle parking.

The project addresses a number of challenges – in laying the right infrastructure at train and rapid bus stations, overcoming perceptions that cycling is unsafe, and filling a significant gap in everyday bike amenities.

As infrastructure – and demand – for transport on two wheels grows across Tāmaki Makaurau, this brief championed the opportunity to reclaim car-dominated space to make cycling more convenient, visible, and respected by all on the roads.

The design response

Standing out on the street, an unmistakeable green canopy is both a distinct visual identity and design intervention in one; consistent in colour with cycle infrastructure across the city, the parking is elevated in visibility – noticed, recognised, and easily remembered. Eye-catching graphic detail finds inspiration in the language of te ngāhere, referencing a stand of nīkau.

The product fits within a standard car park space, and balances structural integrity with intuitive user experience. Racks are easy to use, accommodating varying types of bike, while the ‘open’ canopy allows for both passive surveillance and wayfinding. Integrated community boards and journey-planning maps transform these modules into activated local information hubs.

A modular ‘kit of parts’ approach to product design is sustainable and designed for longevity through: material efficiency, low-impact installation, compact packing and transport, a ‘plug and play’ of replacement parts, and consideration for end of life. In alignment with Auckland Transport’s environmental standards, the modules are produced in durable, locally manufactured materials, while a ‘no-dig’ approach avoids unnecessary excavation – with no paving required for installation. The system can be easily scaled up, relocated, or disassembled, with individual parts repaired or replaced as required; components can be sorted for material recovery and a flat-pack component set allows for reduced environmental impact in packaging and transport.

The design team

Guy Hohmann – Director

Jordan Henderson – Senior Industrial Designer

Joel Beachman – Senior Wayfinding Designer

Sam van der Weerden – Senior Wayfinding Designer

Sophie Harkness – Designer

Sophia Martins-Irvine – Industrial Designer

Hanna Tilsley – Junior Industrial Designer

https://www.maynard-design.com
Instagram: @maynarddesign
LinkedIn: Maynard Design Consultancy

The client team

Auckland Transport

Instagram: @akltransport
LinkedIn: Auckland Transport
https://at.govt.nz

Collaborators

MAG Assembly, Crank, Allyn Sims, Sam Kemp

Submit Your Work

Join the Club

The post Fresh From The Field: Modular Cycle Parking – By Maynard appeared first on Design Assembly.

This month, we’re focusing on “Community & Connection“.

There’s something powerful about imagery that captures people as they really are. Not staged beyond recognition, not polished into perfection, but moments that feel lived in, familiar, and connected to real life in Aotearoa.

For designers, finding stock imagery that genuinely reflects local communities can often be surprisingly difficult. Too often, visuals feel disconnected from the people, places, and everyday experiences we recognise around us. And when we’re creating work intended to connect with audiences, those details matter.

This month’s Truestock selection focuses on Community & Connection, highlighting visual storytelling that captures authentic moments of togetherness across Aotearoa. Shared meals, conversations, neighbourhood spaces, friendships, gatherings, and the quieter moments in between. The kinds of interactions that make people feel human and relatable.

Using imagery grounded in real environments and diverse lived experiences helps creative work feel more honest and emotionally connected. It allows brands, campaigns, and stories to better reflect the communities they’re speaking to, rather than relying on generic international imagery that can often feel out of place in a New Zealand context.

For creatives, these kinds of visual resources become more than supporting assets. They help shape tone, trust, and emotional connection within the work itself.

Truestock continues to build a library that reflects a more authentic, multicultural, and recognisable Aotearoa, captured by local photographers who understand the nuance of our communities and environments.

This article is part of a series brought to you by Truestock
Royalty-free New Zealand stock images capturing an authentic, diverse and multicultural Aotearoa. Shot by award-winning brand and lifestyle photographers.

The post Through the Lens appeared first on Design Assembly.

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.

The brief

We were tasked with repositioning one of Waikato’s most significant landmarks: the 160 year old ‘Hamilton Hotel’. The building ceased to function as a hotel in 1980, so our brand strategy needed to reclaim the historical name, while clarifying its new purpose as a contemporary restaurant and bar. We had to ensure the brand felt respectful enough for long-time locals but vibrant enough for a new generation.

The design response

We built our strategy on a deliberate paradox: “The facade is old. We are not.” We reconciled Hamilton Hotel’s history and its current context with a brand strategy that claims the best of both worlds.

This foundation allowed us to lean into the irony of preserving the original name despite the site no longer operating as a Hotel with the tagline: “is not a hotel, is in Hamilton.” This transformed potential confusion into a cheeky, matter-of-fact brand signature.

The brand is literally “built” from the site, featuring a custom wordmark and monogram inspired by the building’s original facade. We balanced this history with high-contrast typography, pairing the sharp, contemporary Cortese display font with Droulers, a body font that mimics the rhythmic imperfections of a vintage typewriter. This playfulness extends to the tone of voice; we traded hospitality clichés for messaging like “Waiting on you since 1865” and “Here for a long time and a good time.”

By treating the history as a living foundation rather than a static museum, we transformed a dormant icon into a durable, functional brand equipped to lead Hamilton’s modern social landscape.

The design team

Daymark
Thomas Casey
Alexander Wastney
Charlotte Lowe
Essi Airisniemi

https://www.daymark.co.nz/
Instagram @daymarkstudio

The client team

Hamilton Hotel

Instagram @hamiltonhotel.nz
https://www.hamiltonhotel.nz/

Collaborators

Contributors:
Photography: @picturedbylucie @hellopoe
Illustration: @keirrynhintzart

Typefaces:
Cortese by @markvanleeuwn
Droulers by @bureau_brut
Playground by @pangram.pangram
ToY by @outofthedark.xyz
Minott Davida by @hex_projects

Submit Your Work

Join the Club

The post Fresh From The Field: Hamilton Hotel – By Daymark appeared first on Design Assembly.

Today we speak with our Friends Chris Brunner who currently works in an agency role at Digitas based in New Zealand.

Tell us about your career background: 

I’m currently working in an agency role for the first time. Before returning to NZ, my experience was largely within in‑house environments, focused on design, content, and experience. I also spent a significant amount of time working in the UK within the healthcare sector, which is a fascinating space for design – often impacting decisions related to health and recovery journeys.

That experience really shaped my interest in the role of design as a way to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, particularly through the experiences they have with products, services, and systems. Over time, that led me to focus more closely on content as a design medium. I’m especially interested in content design – treating words with the same care as visual design, grounding them in research, and helping people interpret, navigate, and experience information in a way that feels intuitive and human.

Tell us about the studio you work in:

I work at Digitas, a global agency with over 50 offices worldwide. Here in New Zealand, we’re a relatively small team working on significant brands. We work closely with our colleagues in Australia, where the team is a bit larger.

Our work spans digital interfaces and communications, with a strong focus on customer experience. At Digitas, we talk a lot about “Connected Experiences” – designing across channels and touchpoints so customers feel genuinely connected to a brand. That might include personalised interactions, thoughtful design across platforms, and carefully considering how people engage with a brand in different contexts.

What I enjoy most about my role is supporting the team. My favourite days are when we’re tackling a big problem together – not working in silos, but bringing everyone into the room to solve one challenge collaboratively. Those moments are incredibly energising, and I love leading a team that works so well together and consistently produces thoughtful, impactful work.

What does your design process and philosophy look like?

From a process perspective, we’re very focused on the problem first. We follow a fairly classic double‑diamond approach – taking the time to understand and clearly define the problem before moving into solutions.

Where our philosophy perhaps differs is in how deeply we consider content as part of the design experience. Given my background in content, our team spends a lot of time thinking about how words work alongside visual elements to create meaning for people. Language isn’t an afterthought, it’s integral to the experience we’re designing.

We’re usually designing for one cohesive experience but delivering it across multiple channels and touchpoints. That means both the design and the words need to be flexible and responsive, adapting to different contexts while still feeling connected. Wherever we meet the customer, the experience should feel intentional, clear, and human.

What does a typical day in your studio look like?

We start every day with a team stand‑up, where we run through the jobs on the board and talk about what’s on for the day. Sometimes there are new briefs coming in, and from there, our creative teams take ownership of the work.

Typically, a designer and a writer or content designer will work closely together. They spend time understanding the problem, shaping their thinking, and figuring out how they want to approach a solution. The team will often play back their understanding of the challenge before moving forward with a creative response.

Most of our work happens in Figma, and we check in regularly throughout the day with quick drop‑ins to review progress, share feedback, and keep things moving. We’re often shipping work and turning things around fairly quickly, so the day is very collaborative, dynamic, and hands‑on.

What’s one thing that you would like all of your clients to know?

I’d love clients to understand that everything is connected. Even when we’re designing what might seem like an isolated moment or touchpoint, it’s never truly standalone. There are always experiences that come before it and others that follow.

That doesn’t mean we want to turn every brief into something overly complex, but we do want to consider the wider journey. We spend a lot of time thinking about how the moment we’re designing for fits into that broader experience, so it can play the most effective role for the customer and genuinely help them move through their journey.

What are your favourite tools in the studio?

We’re big fans of Figma and the collaborative way it allows us to design together. We do a lot of writing directly within Figma – designing words into interfaces so we can see how content comes to life visually and how it will be experienced by people in context.

Digitas is also part of Publicis Groupe, a global marketing communications company. What’s really exciting about this is having access to a wide range of powerful tools, including Creative OS, Buzz AI, Digitas AI, and a growing suite of well‑managed AI platforms. These tools help us work more efficiently, accelerate our process, and ultimately broaden our creativity.

What are your favourite types of projects to work on?

My favourite projects are always the ones where there’s something clearly in it for the customer. I think the hardest work comes when a business is trying to improve its bottom line in a way that doesn’t necessarily serve people. Even then, we’ll always look for a way to bring the customer back into the equation.

The projects I enjoy most are those with a clear customer problem to solve, rather than just a business problem – because customer problems are business problems. When we’re solving for a real customer need, we’re able to step into their world, think deeply about their experiences, and design meaningfully for that moment. That’s where the work becomes most engaging and impactful.

What project are you most proud of?

We’re really lucky to work with some major brands in New Zealand, one of which is Toyota New Zealand. I’m proud of a lot of the work we’ve done with them, but in particular how we’ve helped evolve their brand over several iterations.

Seeing Toyota’s purpose and platform, Let’s Go Places, come to life in a digital context has been especially rewarding – and even more so now that it’s become increasingly integrated into their product experience across digital channels. Watching that purpose translate into tangible, connected experiences is something I’m really proud of.

Do you have any advice about our industry for emerging designers or career changers?

With all the discussion around AI, it can sometimes feel hard to see a clear future in the industry. But I genuinely believe that passion is what will set people apart. Having a strong sense of purpose behind what you’re designing, and believing in the work you’re doing, gives you a real advantage over simply going through the motions or ‘colouring in the boxes.’

It’s not enough to be good at design, or even great at it. You need great ideas and the ability to bring those ideas to life. That’s where designers have a massive advantage – many people struggle to translate ideas into reality, and that’s your superpower. The more you lean into that, the stronger and more resilient your career will be.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Being part of Publicis Groupe gives us access to a really connected network. We work closely with our colleagues at Saatchi & Saatchi, Spark Foundry, and MBM, and the work they’re doing is consistently inspiring. Beyond that, our global network offers access to case studies and award‑winning work from across the group, which provides a constant source of international inspiration.

Outside of that, inspiration often comes from simply paying attention to the world around you – a billboard you pass on the way to work, the latest email that lands in your inbox, or a digital experience you interact with every day. Sometimes you’re inspired just as much by the things you don’t like as the things you do. Understanding what you want to challenge, improve, or push back against can be a powerful source of creative inspiration.

What hobbies or interested do you have outside of work?

Honestly, very few – work keeps me pretty busy! But the one thing I’m most intentional about making time for is my family. I have two young kids, and whenever we can, you’ll find us outdoors, ideally at the beach and in the water.

Where can people connect with you? 

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisjamesbrunner/

The post Five Minutes with Chris Brunner appeared first on Design Assembly.