Over the past year, I have experienced regional development from a different perspective—not as someone working within a region, but as someone asking:
Want to know why enrolments, attendance and engagement are declining at your higher learning institution?
Here's a simple question.
Have you studied at your own institution recently?
Not attended a graduation. Not visited an open day. Actually enrolled as a learner.
If your role has kept you under constant pressure, it's easy to become disconnected from the experience your learners are having. Meetings, reporting, budgets and compliance can gradually replace direct understanding. Over time, assumptions fill the gaps.
The fastest way to understand what's really happening is to become an enrolled learner yourself.
Go through the enrolment process. Complete the forms. Navigate the systems. Wait for the emails. Try to find the information you need. Attend the classes. Experience the learning environment from beginning to end.
You will quickly discover where the frictions lie.
You'll understand whether your communication is clear or confusing. Whether your systems support learning or create unnecessary barriers. Whether learners feel welcomed, connected and confident, or overwhelmed before they have even begun.
You'll experience your organisational culture as your learners experience it, rather than as your colleagues describe it.
Most importantly, you'll stop guessing what the problem is.
Too often, institutions blame external forces: AI, demographic change, cost-of-living pressures and competition. While all of these can be contributing factors, they can also become convenient explanations that prevent us from examining the experience we actually control.
AI isn't making your enrolment process frustrating.
AI isn't creating disconnected communication between departments.
AI isn't responsible for lengthy programme course descriptors, assessment tasks written in institutional language, the repetition of tasks to achieve a single learning outcome, or timetables designed primarily to meet the needs of the institution.
Those are organisational experience design problems.
If we want better outcomes, we need to become more curious about the learner experience and less attached to our internal assumptions. The barriers that seem invisible from the boardroom or management meetings are often obvious to someone experiencing them for the first time.
Educational institutions exist to facilitate learning. That should include learning about themselves.
Sometimes the most valuable professional development isn't another conference or strategic planning session. It's enrolling in your own institution and paying close attention. You may discover that the problems you've been trying to solve aren't the ones your learners are actually experiencing. And that's where formulating a meaningful response begins.
If we don't experience learning as our learners do, how can we be confident we're solving the right problems?
Debate continues about whether higher education is a business. Within the sector, there is often a strong reluctance to use that language. Many prefer to see education as a public good rather than a commercial enterprise.
But what if we considered this question through a different lens? Rather than focusing on whether vocational training generates revenue, we could ask: does it operate according to the principles that underpin successful businesses?
Businesses do not begin by asking: What product do we want to create? They begin by asking: What problem needs solving? Who has that problem? And what solution will effectively solve it?
Vocational training exists to support transitions into work — whether that means entering a career, changing direction, freelancing, progressing in employment, or responding to changes within an industry.
But vocational training does not serve only one group. It must understand the needs of multiple groups whose problems it exists to solve.
Learners need pathways that help them achieve their career goals. Employers and industries need people with the skills, capabilities, and adaptability required for workforce needs. Communities need a workforce able to respond to economic and social change.
So, if we apply a business lens, we might ask does vocational training:
• understand the career problems learners are trying to solve?
• understand what employers, industries, and communities need?
• design qualifications and learning experiences around those needs?
• know whether graduates achieved the outcomes they hoped for?
• maintain relationships with graduates to understand how their needs evolve?
• use what is learned to continuously improve what is offered?
Businesses do not simply create products. They solve problems, understand the people they serve, test whether their solutions work, and adapt as circumstances change.
Now consider vocational training in New Zealand.
Learners often commit one to three years of their lives to a qualification. They invest significant time, effort, and money. We support them through their learning journey, celebrate their graduation, and then, in most cases, the relationship ends.
Imagine any business investing so heavily in understanding, attracting, and supporting customers, only to stop engaging once the first product has been delivered.
Businesses understand that their relationship with customers does not end when a product is delivered. They continue to learn from customers, identify emerging needs, and develop new solutions.
Perhaps this is one of the clearest examples of why vocational training does not operate like a business.
Do you think vocational training in New Zealand is a business?
An institution’s culture is its hidden curriculum.
It teaches people what is valued, how decisions are made, how learning is supported, and whether curiosity and improvement are genuinely encouraged.
We often think about learning as something that happens in classrooms, workshops, studios, and online environments. But learning also happens through the everyday experiences of the people within an organisation.
So what happens when a learning institution stops learning?
Can a learning institution that does not learn facilitate learning?
A learning institution does not only create learning opportunities for others. It must also create the conditions for its own people to learn. Because everyone in an educational institution contributes to the learning experience.
Teaching staff, technicians, professional services teams, support staff, managers, and leaders all influence what learners experience and what the organisation values.
They model learning through culture and everyday behaviours.
They model it through whether:
• questions are encouraged;
• reflection is valued;
• experimentation is supported;
• evidence informs decisions;
• improvement is expected and enabled.
A learning institution creates an environment where people are encouraged to ask:
What is working?
What is not working?
What can we learn from this?
What could we do differently?
But learning requires more than reflection or collecting information.
A learning organisation turns insight into action.
It asks:
What are we learning from this?
What does the evidence tell us?
What will we do differently as a result?
Because without action, reflection becomes an exercise rather than improvement. Evaluation is not simply about gathering feedback, completing reviews, or producing reports. It is about understanding impact and using that knowledge to improve practice.
The knowledge needed to improve does not sit in one place. It exists across the institution.
The people closest to learners, industries, and communities often hold valuable insights into what is working and what needs to evolve. A learning organisation creates the conditions for that knowledge to be shared, tested, evaluated, and acted upon.
People are not simply recipients of organisational decisions. They are contributors to organisational learning.
This is particularly important because vocational education asks learners to become adaptable, reflective, and lifelong learners.
Our institutions must demonstrate those same qualities.
The most effective learning institutions will not simply deliver learning.
They will continuously learn themselves — using evidence, reflection, and action to improve.
Because a learning institution that does not learn cannot effectively facilitate learning.
Agility has become one of the most sought-after capabilities for the future of work. As technologies evolve and the ways people contribute, create value, and navigate their careers become increasingly complex and unpredictable, people need to solve unfamiliar problems, collaborate across disciplines, and continue learning throughout their lives.
Agility is not simply about preparing people for a particular role; it is about developing the capability to navigate unfamiliar contexts, respond to emerging needs, and continually adapt. These capabilities are not taught through curriculum alone — they are experienced by learners through the way an institution responds, adapts, and learns, and through the culture, systems, and ways of working it models.
This raises an uncomfortable question:
Can an institution that lacks agility genuinely teach it?
If institutional decision-making is slow, innovation is discouraged, and new ideas are constrained by processes, the institution communicates how it really operates. The culture becomes the curriculum.
When adaptation is experienced as continuous and incremental learning and improvement, people are more likely to approach uncertainty in the same way. However, when organisational shifts are associated with restructures, redundancies, or sudden and unexpected decisions, people understandably learn to see change as something to endure rather than shape.
This creates a contradiction. We expect institutions to develop learners who can navigate uncertainty, while the organisation itself is communicating that uncertainty should be avoided.
Agility is the ability to notice emerging challenges and opportunities, respond early, and improve continuously. It is an organisational habit that must be practised.
Our responsibility is not simply to prepare learners for their first employment opportunity. It is to prepare them for a lifetime of adaptation within a changing world of work.
The classroom matters, but it is not the only place where learning happens. Learners experience an institution through its systems, processes, communication, relationships, decisions, and culture. They learn not only from what educators teach, but from what the organisation demonstrates.
The experience becomes the education.
If we want graduates who can navigate an uncertain future of work, our institutions must first become the kind of organisations they want learners to experience, contribute to, and build.
Because a learning institution that lacks agility cannot teach agility.
New Zealand's tertiary education sector is approaching a significant demographic shift.
As birth rates continue to decline, the pool of school leavers entering vocational education will become progressively smaller. Competition for traditional learners will inevitably intensify. Yet, while institutions focus considerable effort on attracting new school leavers, they continue to overlook one of their most valuable communities: their own graduates.
This raises an important question.
Why do we see graduates as former learners rather than lifelong members of our learning community?
Graduation has traditionally been viewed as the end of the educational journey. In reality, it should be the beginning of a different relationship.
Modern careers rarely follow a single trajectory. The pace at which industries are evolving means that today's graduate will need to continually upskill throughout their working life. Lifelong learning is no longer an aspiration—it has become an economic necessity.
Yet vocational education continues to behave as though learning finishes when a qualification is awarded.
This creates a significant missed opportunity.
Rather than continually investing in recruiting new learners, institutions could build lasting relationships with graduates who already know, trust and value the organisation. These graduates represent an existing community with an ongoing need for professional development, specialist training, micro-credentials, postgraduate study and career transitions.
The opportunity extends far beyond enrolments.
Graduates working across industry provide a direct connection between education and professional practice. They can inform curriculum design, identify emerging skills, support work-integrated learning, mentor current learners and provide staff with valuable insights into changing industry practice.
At the same time, graduates benefit from remaining connected. They gain access to professional development, networking opportunities, industry events, research, mentoring and learning that evolves alongside their careers.
Instead of a one-way educational journey, the relationship becomes circular.
Learners become graduates.
Graduates become industry partners.
Industry partners become mentors.
Mentors become learners once again.
This creates an ecosystem where knowledge flows continuously between education and industry rather than ending at graduation.
As the number of school leavers declines, the challenge facing tertiary education may not be "How do we recruit more learners?"
Instead, it may be:
How do we create learning communities that people choose to remain part of throughout their careers?
The institutions that answer this question well are likely to be those that thrive over the coming decades.
Do you remember that teacher at school who changed the game for you? They believed in you, and you responded by acing their class. I bet you also remember the teacher who made you feel bad for asking a question they thought was stupid. They put you down or told you that you were not any good at a particular subject area. Maybe you decided education was not for you because of that experience. Or perhaps someone recognised your potential, and their belief in you changed how you saw yourself and your future.
This extends into higher education. Yes, the overall learner experience matters. But who actually shapes it day to day—who do learners spend time with, work alongside, and build relationships with potentially over years of study?
When I was looking at where to study, it was not a institutional marketing campaign or slogan that influenced my decision. In fact, I can barely remember any of them. It was not a ranking, a campus, or equipment. I chose who I wanted to learn alongside.
When ideas are connected, curiosity is encouraged, and relevance is made clear, a subject you never expected to enjoy can become engaging and meaningful. Equally, you can easily lose interest in a subject you once loved if it is taught without care, your questions are shut down, or you are made to feel you do not belong. The subject itself does not change—what changes is your relationship to it, shaped by those teaching it.
Teachers are often our first professional mentors. They shape how we view learning, our confidence, and our sense of what is possible.
In higher education, I wanted to be part of a community of practice I respected and admired. I wanted to be supported and challenged in a safe environment. I wanted to learn alongside people who were passionate about their discipline, recognised within it, and deeply invested in the success of their learners as future practitioners.
That dynamic does not fade as learners progress. Tutors and mentors in higher education help learners enter a community of practice—one that begins during study and continues into working life. When I decided to undertake a PhD, I chose supervisors based on the experiences of past PhD candidates who had achieved their goals under their supervision.
This is one of the clearest examples of how education is experienced through people. Whether at school, as undergraduates, apprentices, or doctoral candidates, relationships remain central. Environments, systems, and resources contribute to the experience, but it is the day-to-day human interactions that determine whether learners feel supported, challenged, inspired, and successful.
If learner experience is at the heart of educational decision-making, then the people who teach, mentor, and support learners everyday are not a secondary consideration. They are the experience.
Vocational education has been preparing communities for work since its inception, focusing on real-world skills and knowledge that support transitions into employment. Many of the programmes with the strongest graduate outcomes also create opportunities for learners to engage directly with industry through placements, internships and work-integrated learning. The reasons are clear. Learners become part of a professional community. They learn how to adapt to new contexts, contribute as active learners, and build relationships and networks that often shape future opportunities.
The trades have always been foundational to vocational education, but what does the idea of a “trade” mean today?
Traditionally we have associated trades with occupations such as carpentry, plumbing and electrical work, and these remain critically important. Yet perhaps the defining characteristic of a trade is not a fixed occupation but the ability to apply specialist knowledge and skills in changing contexts. If that is the case, then the future of vocational education may be less about preparing people for a single role and more about preparing them to navigate multiple roles, industries and opportunities throughout their lives.
One of the most powerful, and sometimes under-recognised, aspects of vocational education is the way learners find new pathways through their study journey that neither they nor their tutors or institutions could have predicted at the outset. A learner may begin with a clear intention, only to discover through projects, placements, conversations, or collaborative work that their interests shift, deepen or expand into entirely new directions. In some cases, they step into roles that did not even exist when they started their studies.
This is where the relational and community dimension becomes so important. Careers are not only built through the acquisition of technical skills, but through participation in communities of practice. These are the networks, professional environments and shared spaces where knowledge is exchanged, identities are formed, and opportunities emerge. Building relationships within these communities—finding mentors, collaborating with peers, contributing to shared work, and learning how a field operates from the inside—is often what shapes long-term career direction.
Looking back on my own career, I could never have predicted the places I would live and work, the projects I would become involved in, or the professional relationships that would shape my journey. Many people now experience careers that are non-linear, evolving and responsive to changing circumstances. This raises an important question: should vocational education focus solely on connecting qualifications to jobs, or should it help people imagine what meaningful work might look like in their own context, whether they are entering the workforce for the first time or seeking to reskill later in life?
If we accept that industries, technologies and communities will continue to change, then perhaps the most valuable thing we can teach is adaptability. Alongside technical expertise, learners need the confidence to learn continuously, engage with emerging technologies, solve unfamiliar problems, and actively participate in the professional communities that interest them.
Rather than viewing education as a transaction that leads directly to work, we might think of it as an invitation to join a community, contribute to it, learn from it, and help shape its future.
My first encounter with John McCulloch’s archives and artefacts was in storage: boxes of folders spanning numerous decades containing research, inspirational articles, sketches, project documentation, newspaper and magazine coverage, photographs, slides, and disks reflecting changing — and now often obsolete — technological storage systems. Alongside these materials were architectural journals and books collected over many years, as well as countless rolls of architectural plans and drawings, both hand-drawn and digital, stored in drawers and cabinets.
The archive revealed not only the breadth of McCulloch’s practice, but also the importance he placed on process, reference, and the gathering of ideas. In response, I wanted the exhibition experience design to reference the concept of storage in both a physical and architectural sense. What emerged is a system of spatial devices informed by crate-like structures, drawing directly from museum storage and transportation systems — practical frameworks associated with protection, movement, handling, and preservation. Within this context, these elements operate as both display architecture and as references to the archival processes through which architectural histories are stored, relocated, revisited, and reinterpreted over time.
This interest in reuse and adaptation also extends to the exhibition site itself. Drawing Together will be presented at Anderson Park House, a neo-Georgian estate originally built as a private home and later gifted by the Anderson family to the people of Invercargill for use as a public art gallery. From its inception, the building carries a dual condition of domestic and civic intention — a private residence transformed through generosity into a cultural space for public use. Over time, the house accommodated both the art collection and material traces of its own domestic life, forming a layered interior in which everyday inhabitation and public display were interwoven rather than distinct. While the collection is no longer present within the house, its absence remains spatially legible as a residual condition — an absence that continues to shape how the building is read and experienced. This shift moves from objects once housed to a memory embedded within the architecture itself.
Rather than treating the building as a neutral container, the exhibition understands it as an active historical condition shaped by overlapping forms of occupation, storage, and display. It does not seek to replace or re-stage what was once held within it but instead works through the spatial consequences of that change. In doing so, the exhibition introduces an independent system of structures within the house that responds to both its domestic qualities and its former role as a repository of objects and cultural material. This approach is consistent with John McCulloch’s sustained practice of adaptive reuse, including significant work on historic building alterations and additions such as his office in Esk Street and his adjacent home, in which existing buildings were understood as evolving frameworks shaped through continued occupation and reinvention, as living forms rather than fixed monuments.
After reading through the archives, photographing drawings, and visiting a number of McCulloch’s projects across Southland, it became clear that the exhibition could only ever present fragments and moments from a career spanning more than forty years. McCulloch completed over 600 projects throughout the region, extending as far as Queenstown, and his work ranged from community buildings to submissions for projects such as the Buller Grove Housing Competition in Lower Hutt. The scale of this output meant the exhibition necessarily acknowledges incompleteness — that what visitors encounter are selected traces from a much larger body of work.
A recurring quality in many of John’s buildings is their operation almost as villages in themselves: clusters of spaces designed around connection, gathering, movement, and community interaction. Alongside the idea of storage and the archive, I wanted to reference this quality spatially by developing a series of structures derived from crate logics that visitors would navigate through and around. Each space presents its own “village” of community stories, with forms that vary in height, scale, and colour.
The forms of these structures were also influenced by miniature architectural models McCulloch created throughout his career. Encountering these models within the archive highlighted architecture not only as completed buildings, but as an ongoing process of testing, imagining, and spatial storytelling. In some respects, the exhibition structures operate like enlarged fragments of architectural models themselves — simplified constructions that visitors move through and around rather than view from a distance. This relationship between model, archive, and inhabitable space became an important influence on the exhibition experience design.
Further material within McCulloch’s archive included conference papers and essays by Eric Wesselow (1911–1998), a German-born, Montreal-based stained glass artist and advocate for art education in Quebec, whose proposition of a “universal model of art as a catalyst” emphasised expanded sensory engagement. In a 1998 lecture at Lonergan College, Wesselow described a form of cultivation that activates all the senses — a way of perceiving the world through touch, smell, sound, taste, and light, enabling a more intuitive and inventive relationship to environment and experience. His approach to stained glass was equally radical: most notably his removal of the traditional lead matrix, dissolving the dark structural lines between coloured glass in favour of continuous fields of light. This culminated in his 1960 commission for a mural of “light screens” at what is now Montréal–Trudeau International Airport.
In the exhibition, this sensibility is echoed through the use of clear and printed acrylic panels within the spatial structures. These surfaces act as layered windows into McCulloch’s projects, filtering imagery, drawings, and archival fragments through transparency and reflection. The acrylics will be encountered within the ambient daylight conditions of Anderson Park House itself, along with its original domestic lighting, so that light becomes an active medium through which the material is read rather than an external effect applied to it. As a building shaped by both domestic life and civic generosity — originally a private residence later gifted to the community of Invercargill for use as a public art gallery — it holds overlapping registers of intimacy and publicness. The exhibition responds to this condition as something already present within the architecture, allowing light to move through both the historic interiors and the installation, activating surfaces and shifting perception over time.
To extend this spatial and conceptual framework, the crate logic was developed as a thematic system that reflects the diversity of John McCulloch’s architectural practice. Rather than attempting to present the full scope of his work, the exhibition draws together fragments through interpretive groupings based on use, social function, and spatial intent. These include environments for learning and knowledge, domestic life, travel and tourism, heritage and restoration, community gathering, civic and infrastructural interventions, and commercial or trade-based activity. Rather than functioning as fixed categories, these groupings operate as overlapping ways of reading practice, allowing different aspects of McCulloch’s architecture to surface across the exhibition. The crate logic is not a literal formal system applied uniformly, but a curatorial and spatial reading framework that generates a range of experiential conditions, from enclosed volumes to open frames and layered surfaces.
In the exhibition space, these are translated into distinct spatial structures that visitors move between, each carrying variations in colour, scale, and material tone. The colour system reflects McCulloch’s architectural work in its full range: at times integrating with surrounding environmental and material conditions, and at times deliberately contrasting with them. Rather than forming a singular palette, colour operates as a contextual response, shifting between tonal restraint and bold interruption depending on the architectural logic being referenced. Together, these variations shape a shifting field of spatial experience, where each structure signals a different register of use and meaning within his broader body of work — a collective reading of architecture as social and spatial experience rather than fixed object or architectural category.
The structures are constructed from simple materials including plywood and pine, some of which was recycled from a previous billboard project in Southland. They are intentionally economical in construction, hand-built using basic tools and simple methods rather than specialist construction or fabrication techniques. The crate logic that underpins the exhibition is not a fixed or uniformly applied system of construction, but a conceptual starting point that evolves through iterative responses to individual projects. Rather than referencing McCulloch’s own methods of making, this approach reflects the conditions within which his architecture was often realised — including incremental development, and close collaboration with communities. This emphasis on practicality, adaptability, and material clarity aligns with the broader realities of community-focused architectural practice, where making is shaped as much by available means and collective process as by design intent.
The exhibition itself operates as an unfolding spatial inquiry rather than a fixed outcome, continuing to be shaped through ongoing research and engagement with the communities connected to McCulloch’s work.
We are currently so focused on AI and its potential consequences for our lives and work that very little attention is paid to those who were already left behind by earlier waves of technological change. The conversation is dominated by what might happen next, while the realities of what has already happened remain largely unaddressed.
For years, we bought into the promise that technology would make our lives easier, more efficient, more connected. And in many ways, it has. However, for a significant number of people and communities, the opposite has occurred. Instead of ease and connection, there is confusion and isolation. Instead of empowerment, there is persistent and ongoing exclusion.
As someone who is digitally literate it is easy to overlook the exclusions inherent in systems I navigate every day. When your work and daily life are deeply embedded in the digital world, these systems feel intuitive, even invisible at times. But they are not neutral. They are designed, and in that design are centralised and biased assumptions about capability, access, and confidence that do not hold true for everyone.
Through my work and daily encounters in our communities, I regularly see the consequences of this disconnect. People who, for a range of reasons—ageing, economic deprivation, limited access to devices or connectivity, or disrupted learning pathways—have not been able to keep pace with rapid technological change. Supporting even a small fraction of these individuals reveals the depth of distress and isolation that digital exclusion creates.
This is where people-centred experience design is essential. It is easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm for new and engaging ways of interacting with the world through technology. But good design requires us to recognise that not everyone is like us, and that systems built without this awareness can unintentionally exclude those who do not fit the assumed user profile.
Technology, when poorly considered, does more than create inconvenience. It shapes whether people can remain connected to the systems that structure everyday life. It can be a systematic barrier to connection, participation, and belonging. These challenges affect confidence, dignity, and a person’s capacity to engage with society on equal terms.
This has been unfolding for years, as more people are steadily excluded from the systems required to live. As we look ahead to the next wave of transformation driven by AI, the stakes become even more pronounced. Experience design and innovation are now actively shaping the conditions of society, influencing who can participate and who is gradually pushed to the margins. How this trajectory continues will determine the extent to which participation in everyday systems remains conditional.
In an early school report—yes, I was clearly an archivist even then—I told a teacher I wanted to be an artist. Why an artist? Because I loved making things. Making wasn’t digital; it was tactile, hands-on, and experiential. At school, ‘art time’ was one of the few spaces where you could create with risk and freedom.
I found the same sense of possibility in English. Creative writing opened another door: stories, poems, fragments of imagination made tangible through language. Between Art and English, there was room to test ideas, experiment, fail, and try again.
Elsewhere, creativity existed but was constrained. In New Zealand intermediate schools, we had “Manual”: woodwork, metalwork, sewing, cooking. I enjoyed these classes, but they were highly prescribed. You followed instructions and produced the same outcomes. That’s why so many relatives ended up with identical paper towel dispensers, notepad holders, duffel bags, and pillowcases. These objects were made by us, but they weren’t really ours.
I wanted to be an artist because that is where the system positioned the making of things that were yours—tested, explored, iterated. But it was also where creativity was categorised under the banner of the arts, presented as the only legitimate place for creativity.
By secondary school, even that illusion of freedom began to erode. External assessors, we were told, ‘liked’ certain kinds of work. To achieve better marks, you learned to anticipate their preferences and shape your output. Creativity became a strategy. Innovation became compliance.
Worse, in sixth form, assessment was rationed across disciplines. You could produce work at the level of an A in Art or English, but if top grades were already ‘allocated’ to science or maths, they were unavailable. Effort and achievement became decoupled; a C pass translated what might otherwise have been excellence.
Over time, this teaches that creativity is conditional. It belongs in certain rooms, under certain labels, and only counts when validated by particular frameworks. It teaches you to second-guess instincts, design for approval rather than discovery, and narrows who gets to identify as creative.
By art school, I understood how the arts—and ‘artists’—were positioned: constrained and often devalued, separated from problem-solving, learning, and innovation.
This is where we find ourselves: silo creativity, and its value erodes. Over time, we internalise these boundaries: we protect our work, narrowly categorise our knowledge and skills, and in the process, allow ourselves and our organisations to be devalued, despite the real and measurable economic and social value creativity generates.
We have been trained to reduce understanding to historic silos. It is up to us whether we continue to perpetuate these silos—or reclaim creativity as a shared, generative force shaping our world everyday in profound, life-changing ways.
According to Te Ara, New Zealand has one of the highest numbers of museums per capita in the world. The majority of these museums are ‘micro’ (volunteer-led). While undertaking my PhD research, I recorded 40 museums in Southland (2017–2020), suggesting we are likely underestimating the total number of museums across the country. At a time when museums are increasingly competing for funding and attention, what exactly are museums selling? What problem are they solving? And why have ‘micro’ museums proliferated across the country to form the majority of the sector?
Museums are selling representation and belonging.
Communities don’t engage with museums simply to view collections; they want to see themselves and their communities reflected in the stories being told. When a region establishes a museum, it is often an act of recognition—a way of saying that the lives, industries, struggles, and achievements of local people are stories worth telling.
Because most of our museums are volunteer-led, the people caring for collections often have lived experience connected to them. They may have worked in the industries represented, lived through the events being interpreted, or have family ties to the people whose stories are being told. This proximity gives community museums a distinctive authority, where interpretation is shaped not only by artefacts and archives but by memory, experience, and local expertise.
We often encounter a different model in larger, centralised museums. Many of these institutions grew from micro, community-based foundations that have professionalised. Professionalisation brings many benefits—resources, specialist knowledge, conservation standards, and design expertise. However, it can also shift the focus of museums away from the representation and belonging that underpinned their origins, toward what museum professionals determine to be worthy of interpretation, display, and preservation.
In this model, authority increasingly sits with directors, curators, technicians, designers, and architects who design experiences for communities rather than with them. When communities are positioned primarily as audiences rather than participants, museums can weaken their ability to provide the representation and sense of belonging that first gave them purpose.
This can create a disconnect between museums and the communities that financially sustain them, leaving belonging and representation as unmet needs that will be satisfied elsewhere. This need is not about creating bigger, more impressive buildings, additional climate-controlled collection storage, or hiring more museum professionals. It is about focusing on the problem you solve for the communities who sustain you.
The proliferation of micro museums across New Zealand may already tell us what museums are selling. Where communities find representation and belonging, museums thrive. Where they do not, communities create their own.
Right now:
80% of those working in our creative industries don’t hold formal creative qualifications.
Over 80% of those who do earn creative qualifications do not enter the sector.
This mismatch tells us that while our higher education system produces talented graduates, it often fails to connect them with a creative career. At the same time, the creative sector is now the country’s fourth largest export earner, more productive than agriculture, and central to how Aotearoa presents itself on the world stage.
So what is being done to address this misalignment?
I benefited from arts education from a young age, but many learners today do not have the same exposure. Creative subjects were visible to me at primary, intermediate and secondary school, which meant I could imagine them as a pathway. That early exposure is vital.
Over the past decade we have seen arts subjects decline across many schools. When those opportunities disappear, the visibility of creative careers disappears with them, filtering through to higher education and affecting the number of learners who see the creative industries as a viable option.
I have seen this firsthand managing creative industries vocational programmes. The pattern is consistent: the less exposure learners have to a discipline, the less likely they are to consider it as a career. By the time learners are considering tertiary options, their sense of what is possible is already largely formed. Which means we cannot fix this issue at tertiary level alone.
If we want to address the disconnect between education and industry, we need to think about the entire learning pipeline. Schools, tertiary providers and industry need to work together to show learners what creative work looks like in practice.
There is evidence that fewer learners are choosing arts subjects when given the option. But we should also ask whether the choices reflect the careers that now exist. The creative industries include fields that barely existed a generation ago.
I remember visiting Southland primary schools to talk to children about animation. They were transfixed by the idea that someone could actually become an animator. A week later I received a large pile of illustrated letters from these children. I still have them. They captured the moment when something abstract suddenly became real — when creativity shifted from something they enjoyed to something they could do in the world.
If we want a creative economy, we need to support pipelines that help learners make that connection early: exposure, mentorship, industry engagement, and clear pathways. I know we have passionate teachers who want young people to see creative careers as possible. Now we need stronger cooperation and support across the sector, building pathways that show learners creativity is not just something they enjoy — but something they can build a future around.
For me, a great exhibition is grounded in process. An exhibition reflects a moment in a process — a fluid architecture of the questions, conversations, experiments, and decisions that are still unfolding.
Traditionally, the people we hope to engage are framed as audiences, visitors, or viewers. We constantly ask ourselves: what do visitors want? How do we attract more of them? In doing so, we reinforce the very distance these terms create. They position people as observers of a completed work rather than participants experiencing a living process. The exhibition becomes a product to be consumed, rather than an intentionally pursued space where engagement actively shapes ideas.
In the conventional approach, exhibitions are presented as completed works, and those who engage with them are positioned outside the process that created them. The research, debates, testing of ideas, false starts, and shifts in direction are largely invisible.
Yet exhibition-making is inherently iterative. It responds to new questions, new information, and new perspectives as ideas develop. The process evolves through dialogue between artists, curators, designers, technicians, institutions, and the communities connected to the stories being explored.
The most exciting part of an exhibition happens in that making. It is the stage where ideas are unpredictable, where the direction is open, and where the shape of the story is actively in motion. So why do we continue to position the publics we serve as visitors, audiences or viewers, and then wonder why we are not getting the numbers of ‘visitors’ we want through our doors?
It is like arriving at a party after everyone has gone home. The energy, the conversations, the experimentation that gave the exhibition life have already happened — and ‘visitors’ are asked to respond only to the echoes of that process. Meaning feels fixed, and the opportunity for people to influence or participate in the work is lost.
So what if we invite people to join the party, rather than view the aftermath?
When people are engaged while the work is still forming, they move from observers to participants. Their questions, perspectives, and experiences become part of the conversation, shaping how the exhibition develops. The exhibition becomes an artefact of engagement with communities — still in motion, still provisional, still generating meaning.
Like a party, this process can be messy and unpredictable, but that is precisely the point. Exhibitions are not products to be packaged and delivered; they are relational, iterative experiences that gain richness from the interactions, surprises, and negotiations that happen along the way. Meaning is never fixed, and the work continues to evolve as people respond, reflect, and participate.
Most organisational change fails because it focuses on change instead of responsiveness. Announcing a grand change plan, even with good intentions, rarely, if ever, delivers the outcomes leaders hope for. So, what shapes outcomes? The culture and daily experience of your people.
The goal is not change. The goal is to facilitate responsiveness.
Responsiveness means continuously adapting, problem-solving, and shaping solutions together as part of business-as-usual practice. When people have agency and ownership, engagement follows.
Responsive cultures are built with teams.
When leaders treat change as a top-down initiative, the people expected to implement it experience disruption, uncertainty, and fear.
Teams see their voices are not shaping outcomes, and disengagement quickly follows. The result is apathy, minimal compliance, or resistance. Change fails not because people are unwilling, but because the experience is poorly designed.
People fear loss — of role clarity, autonomy, relationships, or relevance. When organisations wait until responding becomes urgent, interventions are large and threatening. What could have been incremental adaptation becomes disruptive restructuring.
Experience design is key.
Small, visible shifts that demonstrate tangible benefits help teams see the value of responsiveness. Fostering a culture of self-driven capability development, collaboration, and experimentation are not support activities — they are your culture. Change is a byproduct of a culture that champions responsiveness.
Rigid hierarchies, gatekeeping roles, and fragmented communication create environments where responsiveness struggles to thrive. Leaders who introduce change without reshaping culture are often seen as threats. When people feel they need to protect themselves, silos form, and focus shifts away from protecting the organisation.
Incremental, co-created progress works.
By involving teams in shaping solutions, testing ideas incrementally, and demonstrating value early, organisations gradually build a culture of responsiveness. Over time, this culture becomes self-reinforcing: adaptation happens naturally.
Success, in practice, is not about executing a change plan.
It is about creating an environment where responsiveness is embedded in everyday experience. Change is inherent — not because of a change plan, but because your people have been empowered to respond.
Drawings for the Cavern House, John McCulloch
