Making Methods

Click on a workshop, activity or speaker below to learn more.

This toolkit uses haptic interaction to facilitate an active space for discussion and idea generation around the topic of belonging. By exploring materiality and reading artefacts physically, we are able to access innovative ways of connecting with others. These artefacts act as a starting point for discussion and enable creative thinking by allowing users an opportunity to better understand their unique and shared experiences of the world. The aim of this toolkit is to create a psychosocial space that allows users to explore their experience in a productive and inclusive environment. By using a shared language, it creates an opportunity for innovative discussion around the topic of belonging and designing for socially inclusive communities.

Workshop Times

Thursday 19 November — 10:00AM-11:00AM @ The Design Space
Saturday 21 November — 10:00AM-11:00AM @ Ellen Melville Centre
Tuesday 24 November — 1:30PM-2:30PM @ Gallery 2, AUT City Campus
Thursday 26 November — 10:00AM-11:00AM @ TBC, AUT South Campus

With over 200 ethnic groups identified and around 160 languages spoken, the population of New Zealand is a beautiful amalgamation of nationalities and cultures, providing us with a wonderful complexity in how we communicate. What happens to that complexity when we remove verbal or written communication? In this workshop, we will think abstractly about how our hands can create a visual language, through utilising design thinking, colour explorations and mark making experiments. The aim is to elicit an emotional response from the viewer and to communicate a particular message or feeling. By taking into consideration the different communication abilities of those visiting a place of health and wellbeing, and understanding the essentiality of aesthetics in this context, the ideas of communication can reach much deeper to uplift, reduce anxiety, empower and support visiting patients. (Disclaimer: no previous visual arts experience is required to be part of this workshop)

Workshop Times

Thursday 19 November — 11:30AM-1:00PM @ The Design Space
Saturday 21 November — 10:00AM-12:00PM @ Ellen Melville Centre
Tuesday 24 November — 12:00PM-2:00PM @ Gallery 2, AUT City Campus
Thursday 26 November — 10:00AM-11:30AM @ TBC, AUT South Campus

Thinking Through Making is a workshop that aims to bring people together to better understand and create meaning through the act of making. The workshop offers a creative research approach to promote conversation and discussion about more abstract concepts, giving meaningful form to ideas that might otherwise be overlooked or misunderstood.

Workshop Times

Thursday 19 November — 1:30PM-3:00PM @ The Design Space
Saturday 21 November — 2:00PM-4:00PM @ Ellen Melville Centre
Tuesday 24 November — 2:00PM-4:00PM @ Gallery 2, AUT City Campus
Thursday 26 November — 12:30PM-2:00PM @ TBC, AUT South Campus

Mindset is a tool to identify your personal values and reflect on what is most important to you. It consists of two parts: a ‘values board’ and a worksheet. Using the coloured key and tokens, choose your top three values for each category and place the corresponding tokens on the values board. The worksheet is designed to help you reflect on which values you want to prioritise and why. Your answers can be simple – there’s no expectation that you write anything profound, and you don’t need to share your answers with anyone. It is just for you to think about.

You'll get to take a copy of Mindset to take home with you, which you can do again at a later date and see if your values change over time!

Workshop Times

Saturday 21 November — 1:00PM-2:00PM @ Ellen Melville Centre
Tuesday 24 November — 3:00PM-4:00PM @ Gallery 2, AUT City Campus
Thursday 26 November — 11:30AM-12:30PM @ TBC, AUT South Campus

The Museum of Meaningful Moments is a community wellbeing project that invites people to respond to questions or prompts about their everyday experiences in times of change.

The Museum of Meaningful Moments has been designed so that people of all ages and from all walks of life can share their experiences, observations, insights, and stories in whatever form they feel most comfortable with. It may be a photo, video, some artwork, or something completely different.

The purpose of the Museum is to showcase and celebrate the moments we take for granted in daily life. We want to help show how we all see things in different ways. When viewed as a whole, the collection is a reminder that while our everyday experiences may be unique to us as individuals, our collective experience at any given moment is made up of many different points of view. In this way, the Museum of Meaningful Moments allows us to see what is unique, and what is shared, in our experience of times of change.

Workshop Times

Thursday 19 November — 10:00AM-11:00AM @ The Design Space
Saturday 21 November — 11:30AM-12:30PM + 12:30PM-1:30PM + 2:30PM-3:30PM @ Ellen Melville Centre
Tuesday 24 November — 12:00PM-1:00PM @ Gallery 2, AUT City Campus
Thursday 26 November — 11:30AM-12:30PM + 1:00PM-2:00PM @ TBC, AUT South Campus

Tell-a-phone is an interactive installation that asks viewers to respond to a question by speaking into a dial telephone. Tell-a-phone provides a safe and private space for people to share reflections, ideas and feelings in response to a particular topic or question. The act of engaging with the materiality of an old dial phone helps ground people and encourages them to form a reflective connection to a simple act of communication about what is important to them at that moment.

Creating Community is a pop-up exhibition series that invites members of the public to engage in meaningful discussion about what community means to them. This research explores how designed objects – or critical artefacts – can evoke different lines of thinking and a different depth of conversation to a written or spoken inquiry. As an intangible and evolving feeling, community can be difficult to describe. The critical artefacts in this exhibition are designed to explore the value of community and where we draw the line for what is and is not one.

Systemic Racism is killing tangata whenua.
Māori live on average 7 years less than Pākehā. That’s about 10% of your life.
Our health statistics are damning and frankly embarrassing.

Racism is a public health issue.
Imagine if treating Racism were given the same urgency as our Covid-19 response.

In emergency medicine, often only the signs and symptoms are treated. A diagnosis is not necessary.
This is how Racism has infected our health system. We fail to actually acknowledge and diagnose Racism.
We’re busy, we’re stressed, and we’re ashamed.

How do we pause so we can stop the virus of Racism?

Racist as is a series of provocations. They are designed to spark conversation on Racism in Aotearoa. This critical design hopes to facilitate discussion, thinking, and learning on the impacts of colonisation. And how Racism has shaped our institutional structures.

Health and social inequities materialise through the socio-cultural, political, economic and environmental conditions that shape health and quality of life. Healthcare organisations participate in this, sustaining or exacerbating the marginalising effects of these structural inequities. It has been argued that inequity is built into health systems through poor access to determinants of health, ineffective access and engagement with health services, differences in quality of care, fragmented care, services that are not tailored to the unique and specific life circumstances and realities of persons and their whānau, lack of cultural fit, structural violence, stigma and racism.

Real and lasting change is unlikely without paradigmatic shifts in the way health is conceived, designed and delivered within formal health structures, given the critical role they have as sites in which these health and social impacts intersect. However, this is unlikely to materialise by engaging solely with formal health services. Such a shift needs to be people-centred, co-produced, and underpinned by authentic relationships, and sharing of power. Indeed, the knowledge and capability needed for transformative change likely already resides within communities.

This panel discussion will explore how the use of design and creative methods may provide alternative ways to engage with systemically marginalised communities, and how these approaches may also help make visible new opportunities for care.

Hosted by Nicola Kayes and Steve Reay.

Jacqui Dillon has had a successful corporate background including general management and senior sales and marketing roles for international brands. Jacqui has worked as a specialist advisor and consultant on marketing, not‐for‐profit and business partnership formation, and creative strategies for CSR. In addition, Jacqui Co-founded Robinhood Asia, a not for profit focused on creating social initiatives that assisted those in poverty and benefited business. Prior to joining Auckland City Mission as Services Development Manager, Jacqui was CE of SAFE Network Inc. and the driving force behind the establishment and launch of www.theharbour.org.nz a New Zealand‐based web‐portal co‐created to address the need for accessible and credible information for all community members affected by sexual abuse or offending, their families and whānau.

Nō Ngāti Uenukukōpako, nō Ngāti Pikiao a Shiloh Groot. Shiloh Groot is an interdisciplinary social scientist who works in the fields of Indigenous/Māori world views and communities, and homelessness and urban poverty. Shiloh has been researching homelessness for over a decade, and advocates for a humanistic approach to understanding and responding to homelessness. Shiloh is a long standing member and former co-chair of the Tangata Whenua Caucus for the New Zealand Coalition to End Homelessness (NZCEH), where they have been asked to advice on the expansion of research strategies that will inform the development of national policy and service provision.

Daniel Sutton is a Senior Lecturer at AUT with a passion for developing the mental health workforce as well as services. Daniel coordinates the national new graduate programme for allied mental health clinicians and teaches postgraduate papers in mental health. Daniel's research focuses on the development of mental wellbeing through citizenship, belonging, meaningful occupation and sensory based interventions. Daniel is also the Chair of the West Auckland Mental Health Trust, which provides a peer led centre for social support as well as creative and educational activities.

Dean Manley has over 20 years involvement in specialist mental health and addictions services and community development sector. Dean's background is in supported employment, Like Minds, Like Minds (Mental Health Foundation) population health project, and Recovery/Lived Experience Leadership politics. Dean has experience in health sector service delivery, policy analysis, peer-led research and evaluation (Mad Studies, a division of DisabilityStudies), and community-development research. More recently representing the service user and whānau voice at executive leadership level at Waitematā District Health Board mental health and addictions’ services, Dean helped develop the Lived Experience Advisory Council (independent advocacy and advisory group consisting of people adversely affected by adverse events in mental health services.)

Professor Denise Wilson (Tainui) is Professor of Māori Health, Co-Director of Taupua Waiora Centre for Māori Health Research, and Associate Dean Māori Advancement at Auckland University of Technology. Her research includes a focus on family violence, cultural responsiveness and Māori/indigenous health. Having previously chaired the Family Violence Prevention Investment Advisory Board (Ministry of Social Development), Denise is currently the Deputy Chair of the Family Violence Prevention Expert Advisory Group, and is a member of the Health Quality & Safety Commission’s Roopū Māori, and chaired the Mortality Review Committee’s Māori Caucus. Denise served six years on the Family Violence Death Review Committee and has contributed to the development of the Ministry of Health’s Violence Intervention Programme.

Denise Messiter is the General Manager for Te Whariki Manawahine O Hauraki. Denise has developed a kaupapa Māori approach for supporting whānau to recover and heal from domestic violence. She has a background in indigenous and community development and has worked with the Xhosa people from South Africa, and First Nations Australian communities in Kalumburu and Wadeye on traditional indigenous approaches to healing domestic violence. Denise has qualifications in Kaupapa Māori Counselling and Not for Profit Management.

Workshops are held at dedicated times (click a location below to see workshop times). Activities are available at all times during opening hours at each location. The Museum of Meaningful Moments is running as both a workshop and activity.