The spectacle of competence: global pandemic and the redesign of leadership in a post neo-liberal world

This discussion piece examines the role that New Zealand played in the global media narrative about Covid-19 responses. The New Zealand Government’s response in general, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s leadership in particular, came to stand as an example of functional governance to a world experiencing the accelerating fragmentation of Western neo-liberal geo-political economy. The ‘spectacle of competence’ that has characterized Ardern’s leadership is bound up in a pre-existing set of political fault lines that the pandemic has served to amplify. New Zealand’s geo-political cultural position, and the competence (both spectacular and actual) that its leadership has come to represent reveal something of the fracture of political economy of the global North and West, not least because the construction of New Zealand as representing a successful ‘Western’ response is geographically, economically and culturally inaccurate. Contrasting the New Zealand government’s pandemic response to the failed responses of Western models of governance, this piece argues that Jacinda Ardern’s leadership is important, not because it represents an example of Western success but rather because it represents a departure from the deadly consequences of neo-liberal norms

Designing educational experiences: Resurrecting the archive through collaborative exhibition: Augmented reality, virtual reality and the National library of New Zealand

This article considers the creation of an exhibition at the National Library of New Zealand. Specifically, this project was a collaborative endeavour between the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington and the National Library, aimed at utilising new technologies and traditional archival research to bring forgotten and rarely accessed data back to life in a public exhibition. From the outset this project sought to combine the best of both new educational technologies (augmented reality) with tactile, physical materials (created using laser cutting and 3D printing) that the public could handle and use in a way that would break down the barriers between exhibition objects and resurrected archival data. The result was an interactive exhibition focused upon the emergence of Wellington as a city and the growth of its waterfront over the last century and a half. The design research project took place between November 2016 and February 2017 and resulted in a project exhibition open to the public running from May 2017 to February 2018. The principle supervisors were Leon Gurevitch and Tim Miller with a research team of three research assistants (Stefan Peacock, Alasdair Tarry and Louis ElwoodLeach)