Design for Health
Symposium 2023

Creating space for our future leaders

The Design for Health Symposium 2023 was a fulfilling day of kōrero around how we can work with communities to bring their solutions to life. It was led by rangatahi as leaders of the future, and prompted rich discussion and creative thinking about what the future holds when rangatahi are leading the way.

The Kōrero

Each speaker lead provocative discussion around what a brighter future might look like where solutions are created within and in partnership with communities. Many of our speakers were rangatahi doing awesome mahi (or whom were were working with rangatahi).

Following this, attendees we invited to collectively reflect, question, engage and respond to the speaker’s prompt through a variety of creative activities as outlined below.
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A series of zines for each topic was created to capture the collective learning from these discussions and was shared back with attendees in the months following the symposium.

What makes me Plastic?

Jordan Tane, Kyani Utia, Sisi Panikoula

What Makes Me Plastic? focussed on rangatahi Māori and Pasifika displacement within their culture and identities, and being labelled ‘plastic’. Attendees were asked “How might you visually express your identity?” and then encouraged to draw a self portrait and then write, draw or scribble around their portrait to capture how they identify themselves and why certain factors were expressed as integral to their self-identification.

Workshop Reflection

Identity was expressed through a range of concepts and emotions. Participants wrote about seeing themselves and being perceived by others in the context of the impact of colonialism, migration, and gender identity.

There was also a positive focus on the future, acceptance, growth, family, home, finding beauty in nature, being proud of one’s identity and being creative.

Self-image was linked to the feelings of shame, feeling displaced, and disconnected from own roots and culture.

Kimi Manaakitanga

Mychail Harris-Hill, Ngahina Legros

Addressing the inequities of struggling youth in Kirikiriroa, Mychail and Ngahina discussed the founding of Kimi Manaakitanga. As a youth-created service, the representatives of Kimi Manaakitanga asked those in attendance “How can you support the creation of youth-developed, operated and led services that balances the expectations of adults?”Attendees were invited to use playdough to create something that responded to the prompt, accompanied by a description of what they had created.

Responses focused on the qualities or conditions needed to support the creation of youth-developed, operated and led services that balance the expectations of adults. This means…

…being open to thinking outside-the-box…

…providing a foundation for a child/youth-led place for growth…

…providing safe, supportive youth-led spaces and resources…

…listening actively to understand and without judgement…

…creating a network of adults/services for rangatahi to express their concerns, expectations, needs, and aspirations…

…re-examining the adult perspective and letting go of the need for power and control to shift this.

Mahitahi / Co-design:
Finding common ground

Anna Rolleston

Mahitahi (reflecting Māori collaboration) and co-design (working with rōpu who will be impacted by services) are methods of inclusion and acknowledgement of those who inform the services created and modified by organisations. The activity helped symposium attendees’ explore how to foster trust and understanding with persons unfamiliar to certain concepts.

Attendees were tasked with creating instructions for an ‘alien’ on how to make toast. They first did this individually, then compared their process, combining this to create the ultimate instructions for how to make toast.

Afterwards, the group reflected on what they learnt from the exercise about how people communicate and understand things differently, and made an encouraging sign that captured their learnings.

Workshop Reflections

Many people created signs that highlighted the importance of collaboration, the idea of being a collective and togetherness, feeling confident in each individual's contribution, valuing different perspectives and finding the beauty in simplicity (keeping it simple).

Workshop Reflections

Whakamana te reo ā ngā rangatahi ki roto I ngā ratonga hauora Empowering the voices of our young people in health services)

Te Wai Barbarich-Unasa

Rangatahi engagement in health services occurs daily. However, understanding how to positively engage rangatahi in health services requires both a kaupapa Māori guided approach and one that is directly targeted to their speciﬁc age group. Prevention of the over-representation of Māori among the negative statistics amongst is extremely important, especially for the future of rangatahi. Te Wai asked attendees “What would help improve well-being for rangatahi and what could you do differently in your practice?”Attendees were invited to create a ﬂyer about wellbeing for rangatahi using unusually shaped paper, markers and crayons in response to the prompt.

Participants reﬂected through the workshop activity, “ What could you do differently in your practice?”

Beyond the data: Rangatahi
re-storying Māori health research

Tom Johnson, Tomairangi Morgan

Rangatahi who are engaged in Māori health research have used interview and secondary data about Māori health and wellbeing issues to re-tell stories in ways that transcend ‘traditional’ research analysis and dissemination methods.

Whakauae Research is an Iwi-owned Māori health research centre that works closely with Rangatahi to build engagement, capacity and capability in the Māori research space, and to consider how might we bring Rangatahi into research spaces to innovate and re-design research thinking and impact?

The team asked “What does a safe and nourishing home space look and feel like to you?” Attendees were invited to express what a safe and nourishing home space looked and felt like to them using an assortment of different coloured shapes, accompanied by a description of their creation.

Home is not so much a physical space, but rather an ‘epicentre’ or a ‘heart’ of relationships, connection, togetherness and shared values we keep coming back to — a safe and nourishing place of stability, learning, playing, memory-making and rituals that build a sense of belonging.

Participants reﬂected that home was a place of comfort and rest, connected to nature; “A source of aroha, manaakitanga and mahi to ensure everyone has the opportunity to grow.”