Local Design
Conference

Dr Yun Suen Pai directs the Inclusive Reality Lab at the University of Auckland, designing assistive technology with the people it serves. Portable Silent Room, a VR space for anxiety regulation co-designed with neurodivergent women and non-binary people, left some of them more anxious at first. Dementia Eyes let hospital staff see their workplace through the eyes of a person with dementia, and every one of them walked straight into the bin. Co-designing touch for care robots showed gentle means restraint, not softness. As AI learns to adapt, let the edge set the brief and keep the dial in people's hands.

Most people and companies only make one book in a lifetime, so Auckland book designer Deshan Tennekoon treats each one as legacy rather than product. For the collector's edition of 'The Incomplete Thombu', T. Shanaathanan's paintings on the loss of Tamil land during Sri Lanka's civil war, he kept the original pages but modelled the binding on colonial property registers from the 1700s. A history of a tobacco company went to print without a single product photograph. 'Chinaman', Shehan Karunatilaka's Gratiaen, DSC and Commonwealth prize-winning novel, took 47 type treatments to carry its unreliable narrator. A talk about making a book worth keeping.

After the uncomfortable sale of a personal painting in 2020, Haser made an instinctive decision to take all of his original works off the market. A personal call with an uncertain outcome has paved the way for a new way of working. Taking his work off the market removed the buyer from the studio, and the influence of sales from his outcomes. Often creatives can't do that, and he is not asking them to; but his argument is that you can only tell a constraint from a compromise if you know what you would make unbriefed. He shows the work either side of that decision, including what stopped selling, and how he tests it now that approval is not the test.

What happens to designing from the process out when the factories are half a world away? Industrial designer Tim Rundle spent 15 years abroad, founding his independent studio in London in 2015, before coming back home to Aotearoa. His work starts in the factory, from the furniture meccas of Northern Italy to the mass production powerhouses of the Far East. Logistical limits led to a new finish for raw aluminium with ReFramed in Denmark, and new ways of shaping timber for Morgan in the South of England. The factory shapes the drawing as much as the drawing shapes the factory.

What if a prosthetic wasn't designed to replace anything? When Dani Clode built the Synchronised arm for disability activist Kelly Knox, she put the pulse sensor where she could find her own pulse, and at the first fitting nothing moved. From that series of alternative limbs to the Third Thumb, a robotic additional digit at the centre of University of Cambridge neuroscience research into augmentation, Dani's work questions the human body as a fixed design template, and explores what happens when the bodies we design for begin to change the brief.

Xenia Sidorenko spent years inside mass fashion production in China, where waste was simply a side effect of making the thing you actually sold. Cutting room scraps, surplus fabric, damaged garments, unsold stock. When she founded USEDEM in 2015 she reversed the relationship. The Buddy Backpack began as discarded jeans. A product line for Levi's, adidas, ASICS and W Hotels began as their own deadstock. The question is not what material do we need to make this, but what can this material become. Not all of it worked. Some ideas were visually exciting and then died on contact with the factory, too much labour, too many operations, or a waste stream that could not be sourced twice. On why industrial upcycling cannot run on creativity alone, and what changes when you design for the waste stream and the production line at the same time.

Strategy Creative are not industrial designers. Which might be the reason they designed a trophy nobody knew how to make. Two sculptural blades of grass, one representing Aotearoa and one South Africa, drawn together by magnets into a single trophy. The blades feature artwork by Kereama Taepa and Bonolo Chepape, while Pakohe and Verdite from each nation form the base. UK manufacturers couldn't achieve the finish, production moved to Australia, aluminium added weight, and magnets alone couldn't stop two heavy blades twisting out of alignment. A concealed acrylic interlock now does the holding, while the magnets preserve the moment of attraction. Almost a year in the making, it's a story about knowing what to protect in an idea and what you're willing to change to protect it.

Most of what fashion calls sustainability is a press release with a photoshoot. Recycling gets the marketing budget because it lets a brand keep selling the same volume, while reduce, reuse and repair all mean selling less. Cactus has spent 34 years doing this the hard way. In 2019 it bought the Albion factory believing ownership would fix the problem, and learned that control over how a garment is made matters but isn’t the whole answer. Its next attempt is CactusLab, where repair is part of the product through logistics, training, pricing and design for repair. Ben Kepes argues that fixing a garment is only maintenance, and the harder work is reimagining what a clothing company sells.

The BNZ Theatre took home the Premier Award at the inaugural NZ Interior Awards. Jun Tsujimoto, Head of Design at Jasmax, takes the room through how the project delivers a landmark cultural venue, breathes new life into Kirikiriroa Hamilton’s city centre and reconnects it with the Waikato River. Jun will share the thinking behind the design – how it draws on the site’s layered history, celebrates identity and place, and uses craft, light and materiality to create a memorable experience for every audience member.

In Cape to Bluff Vol. 2, a $350k house sits beside a $6m house, each given the same care and attention. Both earned their place through the thinking behind them: how they respond to the land, and what they make possible for the people who live there. That was an editorial decision, and it widens the conversation about what architecture can do and who it can be for. A former architect with four books and hundreds of magazine articles behind her, Andrea talks about what earns a project its place in print, and why a book still carries weight in an age of digital feeds and AI summaries.

Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui won the inaugural Kōtuitui Award at the 2026 NZ Interior Awards, the award for work made through genuine partnership. The Wellington Central Library represents far more than a seismic strengthening project. Driven by a deep partnership between Wellington City Council and Mana Whenua, Te Matapihi is a transformative civic institution that has re-established the library as the cultural and community heart of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Athfield and Tihei take the room through how the two practices actually worked together, the significance of trust, respect and reciprocity to the success of the project, and what the partnership looked like when it was tested.

EBB Dunedin began as a client's proposed apartment project. Gary Todd reasoned for a hotel instead, on the grounds it would respect and give more back to Ōtepoti Dunedin than apartments could, and it went on to win the NZIA Sir Miles Warren Award. At Orokonui House, he reasoned for a smaller footprint: a contextual house more open and connected with its eco-sanctuary surroundings rather than a larger one that ignores them. Both come back to manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga, and to the test he applies before anything else. Does this building belong to its place, its people, and its culture?

Toss Grumley mentors business owners, including many of the country's leading creatives, and the same problems turn up in their businesses almost every time. Creative freedom pulls one way, and the business that has to pay for it pulls the other. Toss breaks down the most common mistakes he sees, and owns the one that keeps catching him: being right about a client's business and failing to convince them to act on it. For anyone running or managing a studio who suspects their problem is not a design one.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the story goes, once designed a client's slippers. Architect and maker Gerard Dombroski thinks his profession should get back to that, and stop specifying what it could be designing. From 100 seats made with Yu Mei to a hydroformed sauna that is likely a world first, and the Secret Garden House now nearing completion, he works by leapfrogging between drawing, making and what the material teaches him. Expect the war stories, the workshop hours and the things that went sideways, and a case for reclaiming the territory architects have quietly handed over.

Seachange grew, which is what every studio says it wants. Amanda Gaskin is going to talk about what that actually cost. The stretch of it, the point where being the people holding the whole thing stopped working, and the decision to bring in a General Manager and hand over the running of something she built. But growth doesn't always mean getting bigger. For Seachange, it has meant building a better business: improving how the studio is run, how clients are managed, how projects are costed and billed, and creating the space to focus more deeply on the creative work.

New Zealand has built its economy on the value of what we produce. Dairy, timber, meat and tourism. But what if our greatest untapped resource is how we think? Nick Riley, Founder and Creative Director of Nonfiction, makes the case for design as a powerful driver of economic growth, creating differentiation, building intellectual property and helping New Zealand businesses compete on the world stage. Exploring how our unique cultural perspective can become a competitive advantage in an increasingly homogenised world, Nick challenges us to rethink how Aotearoa creates, captures and exports value.

Stephen McCarthy is Creative Director at Kathmandu, and in his own time he interviews designers about how they actually got where they are. There to There is that project, and this session is what it has taught him: most careers are a series of turns, the useful material is the work people would rather not show, and a portfolio makes the path look far more orderly than it was. He brings [TBC project one] and [TBC project two] to ground it, including moodscroller, the side project built to interrupt his own doomscrolling.

What does it take to find your creative voice, shape a brand, and navigate the unexpected turns of a design career? In this live session of There to There, Stephen McCarthy sits down with Shabnam Shiwan, partner at Osborne Shiwan, to explore the beginnings, breakthroughs, and challenges that have shaped her journey. From her early design memories growing up in Fiji to rebranding Karen Walker and exploring identity through Place, Shabnam Shiwan shares the lessons behind her creative journey. An honest, insightful conversation about creativity, identity, and finding your way in design.

Arch MacDonnell co-founded Auckland design studio Inhouse in 1995, and has spent more than thirty years working across identity, arts and publishing in Aotearoa. In this live recording of There to There, Stephen McCarthy skips the portfolio highlights and asks about everything around them: what drove the studio from the start, the ambitions that held and the ones that shifted, and the failings that taught the most. Behind them runs a slideshow of offcuts, outtakes, hits and misses from the 1990s to now. An honest conversation about three decades of practice.

Kris Sowersby left Whanganui School of Design to find no jobs, so he started a design business with a friend: no money, no clients, no experience. In 2005 he reversed "milk" in his sketchbook and founded Klim Type Foundry, now known worldwide for typefaces like National and Financier. In this live recording of There to There, Stephen McCarthy asks how a largely self-taught designer from Hastings built a global type foundry from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, and what the path actually looked like.