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

I miss reference letters.

Do you remember when we kept physical archives of letters from colleagues, employers, and collaborators? Pages that spoke not only about what someone did, but who they were.

Among John McCulloch’s archives, I found a collection of reference letters dated 1989, written to support potential opportunities connected to an overseas family trip. Some authors had known him briefly; others had worked alongside him for most of his career. Together they create a layered portrait — professional, personal, and deeply human.

It feels different from today, where references often appear as short endorsements on a LinkedIn profile.

So, what did these letters reveal?

John was registered as an architect in December 1977 and became an active member of the New Zealand Institute of Architects the following year. His professional work mentioned included the limestone cavern house and a retail and administration complex in Te Anau, as well as design involvement in the redevelopment of Steamer Wharf in Queenstown.

But the letters spoke just as strongly about his life beyond projects.

According to the letters, after returning to Invercargill in the late 1970s, John and his wife Anne purchased an older property on two acres. Through sustained effort they transformed it into a family home and landscape retreat. The work included major building alterations undertaken largely by John himself, plus extensive planting, fencing and the creation of a pond. This approach continued professionally, where the outdoor environments created at his Esk Street office property are said to have improved daily experiences for staff and clients.

What emerges is a picture of someone who combined technical skill with practical capability — a designer who also built, repaired, and experimented. Someone whose workshop was as important as his drawing board.

The letters consistently emphasised his character: reliable, hardworking, principled, with strong organisational and supervisory abilities. He was recognised for identifying problems quickly and working toward solutions with determination. Colleagues noted both his design imagination and his ability to collaborate effectively, balancing innovation with sensitivity to people.

One theme appeared repeatedly: energy.

Writers described a person whose enthusiasm influenced those around him — someone who motivated others through commitment, curiosity, and momentum. A professional who embraced new ideas while encouraging collaborators to extend themselves technically when it improved outcomes.

‘A conspicuous motivator’.

These letters are more than references. They are fragments of professional culture — evidence of how reputation, trust, and relationships were built through shared work and lived experience.

They also remind us that, before everything was stored in clouds and databases, archives were physical evidence that a life had been lived — work done, trust earned, connections formed, and impact felt.

I have been reading commentary that asserts tertiary education, in its present form, will be gone in five years. It is a bold claim that highlights a real pressure point: cost versus perceived value.

Tertiary education is expensive. Fees, living costs, lost income, resources, and time commitment all shape decisions. Your potential customers increasingly ask: is it worth it? Do your products deliver real value for the investment required?

The sector is already under strain. Programme cuts, restructures, and closures are occurring internationally. Pandemic recovery and AI dominate headlines, but beneath those factors sits a deeper issue: the value proposition of tertiary education is no longer self-evident.

For some, the language of business — products, customers, value proposition — feels uncomfortable. There is a fear it reduces education to transaction. But acknowledging that people weigh costs, benefits, and alternatives does not diminish education; it recognises reality. People invest time, money, and effort. They consider opportunity costs. Ignoring that framework weakens education’s ability to compete for trust and commitment.

Like any costly service, the benefits must be clear. Yet institutions often communicate process — papers, credits, pathways — while customers ask a more personal question: what will this enable me to do?

There are now credible alternatives. High-quality learning is widely available online, often for free. Self-directed development has never been more accessible. If people can learn on demand at home, where does the value lie for institutions with physical campuses and nine-to-five timetables?

The answer is experience — but only when intentionally designed.

Sitting in a two-hour lecture at 9am that could have been watched online offers little value. Travel, cost, and effort must be justified. Presence alone is not enough. Value comes from active participation: hands-on learning, collaborative problem-solving, and access to specialist equipment. From direct interaction with industry professionals who may become future colleagues. From opportunities to test ideas, receive feedback, and improve in real time.

Equally important is learning alongside peers. Showing up creates accountability. Conversations continue beyond structured learning. Confidence grows through shared challenge. Motivation is sustained through belonging which helps explain why fully online products often experience high attrition. Without community and relational accountability, persistence is harder.

This is not to say online learning lacks value. It is flexible and essential. But it reinforces this key point: experience design shapes engagement, outcomes, and return on investment. Physical campuses are valuable not for the buildings, but for the experiences they enable people to engage with together.

Because customers are not buying courses. They are investing in experiences that meet their personal and professional needs and aspirations.

Your website is often the first experience a prospective student has with your institution. If it is disorganised, confusing, overloaded with content or unclear about your value proposition, what does that say about the study experience you are offering?

If I am considering study at your university or polytechnic, here is the journey I actually want to take when I land on your website:

1. Find my area of interest quickly.
I want to see disciplines, programmes, and pathways clearly organised around outcomes and futures I can imagine — not buried under institutional structures.

2. See outcomes and transitions.
Short alumni stories and videos that demonstrate how study translated into work — not just content about how great the study experience was.

3. See industry endorsements.
I want to see credible validation that your programmes deliver real-world outcomes — but more than that, I want to understand how these industry connections are integrated into the learning experience.

4. See your people.
I want to see the mentors who will support my study and work journey. What do they make? Where do they work? What projects are they involved in? Research is useful, but applied, industry-relevant practice should lead.

5. Access to professional, high-quality content.
Most students today are used to learning from popular, expertly produced online content. I want to see the professional creators you partner with — examples of the content I can engage with as part of my study. This shows me that you offer a learning experience that matches or exceeds what I can access elsewhere.

6. Understand support services.
Show me the wellbeing, learning, and career development services available, and make it clear how I access them.

7. Connect with a real person.
I want the opportunity to have a conversation with someone in the discipline I am considering to help me understand if the programme meets my goals and needs.

8. Process alongside motivation.
Once motivation is established, I want to apply at any stage of this experience.

Many websites start with compliance and administration, creating friction before motivation has even formed. They try to speak to everyone at once — students, partners, stakeholders, government, industry — diluting the content that drives enrolment.

Websites are not neutral containers of information. They are an experience. And the experience your website delivers signals the experience your institution offers.

If you work in education, ask yourself:

When was the last time you navigated your own website as a prospective student?

Museums worldwide are competing for people’s attention while facing shrinking funding. At the same time, how people choose to spend their time has shifted — and will continue to. This forces museums to rethink how they demonstrate their value.

People often say they don’t have time for museums. But people make time for what they truly value. The real question is not time — it’s relevance, connection, and return on effort. We live in a world of instant, on-demand information. Algorithms tailor what we see, and the experience is personalised, immediate, and frictionless. Content can educate, entertain, provoke, or comfort — often all at once — and much of it is created by people who have mastered engagement and emotional resonance.

Now compare that to a museum visit. You must decide to go, plan, travel, find parking, pay admission, and navigate an unfamiliar space. Each step introduces friction. Once inside, programmes are largely predetermined. Planned years in advance, they cannot respond to emerging interests or the needs of different visitors. Institutional priorities are not always aligned with visitor priorities.

As a visitor, I rarely encounter content tailored to me. I engage with what the museum has decided I should. In a world of personalised content ecosystems, this creates a glaring disconnect. This is not a failure of museums. It signals that the environment has changed. Digital content is limited to a screen. It is often solitary and rarely creates shared, physical experiences.

Museums can offer what screens cannot: connection. They can meet us where we are and bring us together. This looks less like static exhibitions and more like dynamic platforms. Less like fixed programmes and more like adaptable experience ecosystems. Less like interpretation and more like participation.

Today museums are social infrastructure: places to gather, debate, make, learn, rest, connect, and reflect. Places where you do something, not just look. Where memory, identity, and belonging are actively constructed together. Their competitive advantage is not information. It is authenticity, presence, and shared human experience.

Not just places people should visit — places people need.

I have read countless mission, vision, strategy, and intent documents — particularly those related to education and the creative industries. The more I read, the more I question whether these produce real value. In the age of AI, this concern is even more pronounced: many documents read as interchangeable, with the same aspirational language and commitments to excellence, innovation, collaboration, and impact. The lived reality within organisations often tells a different story.

Having led teams throughout my career, the biggest disconnect I have encountered is these documents frequently fail to address the actual problems organisations need to solve. They are often written for a broad external audience rather than for the people delivering the work. As a result, they rarely translate into clear priorities, behaviours, or decisions teams can act on day to day.

Even more critically, they seldom acknowledge capability gaps. Strategy is not just about where you want to go; it is about whether you have the people, skills, systems, resources, and structures to get there. Ignoring this creates frustration for teams because expectations land without the support required to meet them. Over time, this erodes trust in leadership and in the planning process itself.

I am not suggesting that planning, direction, or shared intent are unimportant. But the ability to respond to change in real time is more valuable than a crafted document. Organisations operate in dynamic environments — funding shifts, technology evolves, workforce expectations change, communities redefine their needs. Static plans quickly become outdated unless they are designed to be adaptive.

The most effective organisations I have worked in treat vision, mission, intent and strategy as day-to-day ‘business as usual.’ They focus on immediate priorities and developing a culture capable of responding to change in real time rather than lengthy vision narratives. They invest in leadership capability at all levels and create milestones and feedback loops that enable adjustment rather than assuming certainty from the outset.

So, what does this look like in practice? Focus on the problems you need to solve now rather than the aspirations you hope to reach in five years. Organisations do not have the benefit of a crystal ball. Allocate resources to the capability required to action milestones and evaluate outcomes and be honest about what you cannot do yet.

Accept ambiguity. Real progress rarely follows a neat linear pathway. Circumstances shift, assumptions prove wrong, opportunities emerge unexpectedly. Organisations that thrive normalise iterative learning, adjustment, and recalibration as part of everyday operations, not as signs that the strategy has failed.

In practice, organisational impact is shaped far more by what people do each day than by what is written in a document.

I have loved writing for as long as I can remember. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The opportunity to combine words to create new worlds, conversations, questions, debates, and yes, arguments. Many writers are afraid, and some are also angry at the volume of AI writing now flooding our lives. But the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no stuffing it back in.

I am sure you remember the countless horror movies where characters wished to be rich and then their parents were killed in a plane crash and they inherited their wealth? We are inevitably going to have to deal with the unintended consequences of what we have brought to life, as we have always had to.

AI is clearly good for generating institutional reports, action plans, strategy and vision documents. You know, documents composed quickly and over flowing with repetitive jargon and rhetoric that few people ever read or implement. Of course, the function of these was never to change anything but to solidify the status quo under a tide of pretence. Perhaps AI is making this more apparent, and this pointless work will disappear. Oh my!

But if you are a writer and you have been using AI, you know that AI does not yet experience the world and therefore it doesn’t understand experience. I am sure this will change with time as all things do, but I find myself constantly arguing with AI when writing, and that’s not a bad thing. Due to the extensive analytics that are now part of our daily reality, we expect that AI knows us, it knows our habits, what we think and feel, it listens to us.

But does it really?

We continue to learn and grow every day, and it shapes who we are. In other words, we are not who we were yesterday today, and we won’t be who we are today, tomorrow. Our lives are influenced by unpredictable experiences that fundamentally change us.

For me, AI is not yet at the stage where it can understand this. However, I have found arguing with AI to be useful. Knowing what you don’t want to say can help clarify what you do want to say. It doesn’t reduce the time it takes to write (unless you are producing an institutional ‘vision’ document), but it does allow you to iterate more quickly.

Yes, there are times when it is so far off track from what I am trying to get at that I give up, but I often come back to where it has gone wrong to unpack what I am trying to get to the heart of.

The best writing for me, whether fiction or non-fiction, comes from real human experience – messy, unpredictable, and never fixed. And this is where AI gets it wrong. It simply can’t predict the course of human experience in all its beauty, and all its pain.

So next time you are feeling down because an AI system has not understood your unique experience as a human being, know that it can’t — and that’s not your fault. Actually it’s your strength, as we are all shaped everyday by our experiences, some shared, and some intimately personal, and this is what I want to read about.

I recently read an article about the loss of an artist’s archive, and having worked with many personal collections, I can confidently say that the majority are lost to time. We all hold collections related to our lives and work that will not be preserved, and most collection items chosen for preservation within centralised cultural institutions, are seldom, if ever, interpreted or accessed.

While working with Margaret Mahy on 'The Making of the Word Witch' touring experience, she shared some archives she hoped to include, expressing concern about their fragile condition. Mahy had carried these hand-made books around in a suitcase she used during her engagement work with children as a librarian. One was the first book she remembered writing, around age five, 'Harry is Bad', and another a fully illustrated 'Aranukan Lute Book' she created as a teenager. Pages were held together with Sellotape as they began to fall apart.

I arranged conservation work and created complete digital records, enabling both the loaned original books and digital reproductions to tour. This experience highlighted for me that all collections are vulnerable to loss if the focus is solely on safeguarding via storage rather than making the stories they hold accessible.

When collections are selected for preservation by museums, for example, accessibility is rarely the priority. Many institutions conservatively hold at least 90% of collections in climate-controlled storage, which often accounts for more than half of annual operating budgets.

These measures aim to ensure long-term survival, yet the majority of collections are never seen. Preservation has become synonymous with protection, and engagement has become impossible due to the sheer volume of collections, and is often considered too risky. The common model of collecting ensures holdings continue to grow, yet without activation, they remain stories doomed to be stored indefinitely or eventually deaccessioned.

What this reveals is a fundamental tension in how we value collections: between protection and activating stories. If preservation focuses solely on protection, the knowledge, insight, and inspiration embedded within them is effectively locked away. Stories, ideas, and connections only come to life when they are shared. Without engagement, collections become silent relics rather than living evidence of culture, creativity, and human experience.

Shifting the focus from preservation via storage to active engagement requires rethinking collecting practices. It means prioritising access, storytelling, and interaction. Protection is important, but not at the cost of limiting engagement. True preservation occurs when the stories collections contain inspire new questions, ignite curiosity, and connect people with the past, the present, and one another.

The decline in arts and creative industries training is sobering for everyone in the sector.

I was fortunate to have access to the arts throughout my education. Without exposure in my formative years, would I have taken this path? Probably not. My experience as a student, and later as a tutor and manager developing and delivering programmes, reinforced how strongly education structures shape opportunity.

Across that journey, I saw the siloing of disciplines, the challenges teachers, tutors, and careers advisors face in keeping pace with rapid industry change, and the structural constraints institutions operate within — particularly the lengthy, costly bureaucratic processes to develop or modify programmes. Most significantly, I saw the absence of facilitated industry partnerships and clear pathways into work.

The issue is not a lack of talent or interest in creative careers. It is structural. Training models, institutional systems, and industry realities are no longer aligned — and addressing this misalignment is urgent if we are to sustain the creative sector.

Over my career, I have spoken with thousands of students and parents, and one concern consistently sits at the centre: pathways to sustainable work. While my mother strongly supported my arts development, her preference was that I go to law school rather than art school. Why? Because parents want safety and security, and being an “artist” has long been associated with risk rather than stability.

Policy settings can amplify these perceptions. In Australia, the 2021 Job Readiness Scheme — designed to steer learners toward priority fields — further penalised arts qualifications. While it did not fundamentally change most students’ decisions, it compounded an existing decline in enrolments and reduced programmes offered across universities and polytechnics.

Addressing this misalignment requires more than advocacy for the arts — it requires a rethink of how education connects to practice. If I were an aspiring creative today, I would want mentors active in the industry. I would want to learn in real-world work contexts. I would want to build and feel supported by industry networks that collaborate, share knowledge, and open doors. I would want flexibility and programmes that recognise my unique ambitions. Above all, I would want learning that is connected, applied, and relevant — the kind of education that equips me for the creative life I’m building.

Let’s work together — educators, industry leaders, policymakers, and advocates — to create programmes that are meaningful, integrated with industry, and genuinely prepare learners for the work they aspire to do. Let’s rethink outdated models, innovate where practice and learning intersect, and act to ensure the next generation of creatives have the skills, networks, and opportunities they need. The future of the creative sector depends on what we do now.

Faced with the current model of tertiary education, would I choose to pay for it?

In most cases, no.

Not because learning isn’t valuable — it absolutely is. I have grown through established institutional frameworks. Formal study broadened my thinking, expanded my practice, and opened professional doors. Structured environments and recognised credentials played an important role in my development.

But the world has changed.

Knowledge is no longer confined to institutions. Lectures, tutorials, case studies, industry research, and technical demonstrations are accessible on demand. You can learn coding on YouTube, SEO through podcasts, design in online communities, and business strategy via open platforms. The question is no longer access to skills — it is value. What am I actually paying for?

If learners are expected to pay significant fees, mainstream education must offer more than content delivery. Why, for example, are institutions still investing heavily in resources freely available elsewhere — often by specialists focused solely on crafting engaging content? Replicating what already exists does not strengthen the value proposition. Curation, context, and application do.

Clarity matters too. I don’t want to scroll through walls of text on institutional websites trying to decode offerings. I want to know: who are your people? What are they doing now in sectors I care about? How are they connected to industry? How will they support my career aspirations? Paying fees should buy access to experience, networks, and current practice — not generic programmes delivered by people who have rarely, if ever, worked in my desired or current industry.

So, what would I pay for?

I would pay for professional mentoring rather than traditional teaching — experienced practitioners working alongside me, challenging my thinking, and sharing tacit knowledge that cannot be downloaded.

I would pay for learning in and alongside current or prospective work — not paused employment or simulated exercises detached from reality. Real projects. Real clients. Real accountability. Learning embedded in practice, where theory and application work in tandem and capability is built in context.

I would pay for access to strong professional networks — communities of practice where learning happens through collaboration and shared experience, and relationships extend beyond graduation.

And yes, I would pay for credentials that genuinely signal demonstrated capability, not time served, but competence evidenced in the real world.

Traditional models were built around fixed timetables and standardised curricula. That made sense when institutions controlled access to knowledge. Today’s learners are digitally fluent, professionally active, and surrounded by free expertise. When so much learning is freely available, fees should buy transformation embedded in practice — not transmission detached from it.

If you were paying today, what would you expect in return?

I was introduced to making physical exhibition experience models by Lyn Plummer—an artist who taught me painting (and many other ways of thinking) at art school. Before art school, I was painting full-time and had a fixed idea of the technical skills I needed to acquire. Working with Lyn changed that. She helped me see that painting is spatial and experiential: it is encountered in space, shaped by scale, proportion, distance, and the relationships between bodies, surfaces, and movement. That early shift stayed with me.

Years later, I worked with Lyn again in my capacity as Manager/Curator at the Ashburton Art Gallery on her touring exhibition ‘Modulations: Cantata Reconfigured.’ While the exhibition had a core set of works that travelled, each iteration was reconfigured with new works responding to the architecture, spatial conditions, and context of each venue. Lyn created a physical model of every gallery space to map installations, sightlines, and circulation. Watching her use these models as thinking tools—testing scale, proximity, and movement—was transformative. Space became something you could hold, explore, and experience before anyone set foot in the gallery.

I had seen exhibition models before and was fascinated by them, but watching Lyn actively use them as working tools made the experience tangible. The models enabled me to understand how an exhibition would be encountered, not just seen. This insight informed my MFA practice, particularly as I established artist-run spaces where the interrogation of space as a medium, and how people experience it, became central.

I kept Lyn’s models for years, using them repeatedly in teaching as examples of spatial thinking in action. Over time they became fragile—barely holding together—but that fragility felt fitting. They were never precious; they were tools shaped by use and by the ideas they helped develop. I return to this approach as I explore the architecture of John McCulloch, who used drawing and model-making as core tools.

As I prototype a to-scale model of exhibition furniture for the project, I’m reminded how drawings, models, and prototypes allow ideas to be tested and experienced. People who worked with John recall how he drew during meetings, capturing points raised through sketches as much as notes. Only a few of his models survive, but like exhibition models made from non-permanent materials, they capture a moment when an idea became physical, tangible, and thinkable. Their value lies not in permanence, but in the possibilities they opened for experiencing space.

What could we discover if every idea was first made, held, and experienced?

Images: 1. Lyn Plummer, Modulations: Cantata Reconfigured, Ashburton Art Gallery, photography by Rodney Browne

2. John McCulloch, Model for Southland Polytechnic (now SIT) 1998

3. My work-in-progress prototype for exhibition furniture

Over my career, I’ve conducted far more interviews than I’ve ever attended—and I’ve learned that most organisations have forgotten what interviews are for.

Responsibility for building and sustaining teams has given me a strong sense of how differently organisations approach interviews, and how unclear we often are about their purpose.

Is it an interrogation? An oral exam with pre-scripted questions from a panel, some of whom haven’t even read your CV or cover letter, or an interview led by an HR professional or recruiter who has limited understanding of the role or the needs of the team? Or is it an intentional conversation, designed to understand how someone might contribute to a team with its own culture, pressures, and ambitions?

Having experienced more interviews as a candidate myself over the last year, I increasingly feel that we have lost our way.

Across my career, I have conducted numerous interviews in both small and large organisations. In some contexts I had full autonomy over how interviews were run; in others the process was highly prescribed, with little room to move off script. What I have learned is simple: the best interviews are focused on building your team.

At their best, interviews are conducted by the team members the candidate will work with, asking questions grounded in the actual work and culture a candidate will enter. They create space for meaningful conversation about values, experience, transferable skills, problems that can be solved, gaps that can be filled, and growth that can occur—on both sides. They are not exercises in perfect recall or narrow sector-specific experience.

Face-to-face interviews are my preference, as they allow you to create an environment where a genuine conversation can take place—rather than feeling like an online exam in a small, windowless room (yes, I’ve conducted those too and know they should be avoided!). While online interviews are now routine and often necessary, being in the same room—where the space itself can support conversation and relationship building—still fosters nuance, trust, and exchange, encouraging understanding rather than performance.

Too often, interviews amplify uneven power dynamics. They feel like a return to school—where you sense you have ‘failed’ in the first five minutes while grappling with dated, pre-scripted questions that filter out anyone who does not mirror an imagined ideal. In doing so, organisations lose exceptional candidates.

Building strong, resilient teams requires interviews designed as genuine conversations, not rigid assessments. They are an opportunity to explore skills, values, potential, and how someone can contribute to and strengthen a team; to have a meaningful dialogue rather than a cross-examination; and to invest in the people who will grow, solve problems, and make a lasting impact.

Journey to Piopiotahi, Milford Sound

While travelling to Southland to work on 'Drawing Together: John McCulloch’s Community Architecture', I revisited Piopiotahi Milford Sound. I had never been there in summer; my previous visits were in wilder weather, when the landscape feels fierce and untamed. Still, it was easy to see the appeal of fine conditions for visitors to this World Heritage area.

John McCulloch worked on hundreds of projects across Southland, including tourism infrastructure in Te Anau and Piopiotahi. The Milford Sound Visitor Terminal is one of these. Driving the Milford Road, I imagined the regular site visits described by architect Brent Knight, who recalled the McCulloch team making fortnightly day trips for meetings. What a commute!

The scale of visitation was obvious. Traffic was heavy, and buses filled the terminal car park. Piopiotahi, named after the Piopio, an extinct native thrush, now attracts over a million visitors annually. Numbers grew from around 437,000 in 2012 to 883,000 in 2018. Most visitors take cruises from Freshwater Basin. Around 40–50% of international visitors to Queenstown travel on to Piopiotahi, as do 20% of domestic visitors, and 19% of international visitors to Southland. These figures, from the Milford Opportunities Project, show the pressures on the area and the need for planning.

Although widely known as 'Milford Sound,' Piopiotahi is actually a fiord — one of 14 in Aotearoa New Zealand, all in the South Island, formed by glacial movement carving deep coastal inlets.

Management of the area is evolving. Following six months of work, a new partnership has been established, facilitated and supported by the SDC. Previously shared between RealNZ (49%), Skeggs Group (49%), and the Council (2%), the structure now includes Kāi Tahu, through Ngāi Tahu Holdings, and eight Papatipu Rūnaka — as a 33.3% partner alongside RealNZ and Skeggs Group.

Experiencing the terminal amid such growth highlighted how environments change and how architecture must continually adapt. Projects like this are never permanent forms; they are catalysts. The terminal did more than provide shelter and ticketing — it enabled patterns of visitation, shaped how people arrive, gather, and depart, and organised the relationship between landscape, infrastructure, and experience. It became part of a larger trajectory no single moment of design could fully anticipate.

As visitor numbers rise, expectations shift, and leadership evolves, the architecture evolves too. Additions, reconfigurations, and new layers of meaning become part of its life. Rather than a finished product, the terminal is one stage in an ongoing process — a framework supporting environmental management, tourism, and identity building.

It is exciting to see Kāi Tahu taking a stronger role in kaitiakitanga in Piopiotahi, and to imagine how local narratives and cultural presence may become more embedded in the experience of this extraordinary place, shaping how it is visited and understood.

After returning from a week working in Southland, it has been a pleasure to spend time with publications from John McCulloch’s archives as part of research for the exhibition 'Drawing Together: John McCulloch’s Community Architecture.' I am certainly not an expert in architecture, but, like many, my relationship with it is personal. My mother, an interior designer with a passion for architecture, collected books that allowed me to explore space and design as a child. My parents’ second‑storey extension to our first family home in Dunedin included my mother’s lead‑lighting studio, where stacks of imported coloured glass and feature windows she made revealed the material and social possibilities of architecture.

Through McCulloch’s archives, I am reminded that architecture shapes how we live and move, framing routines, interactions and a sense of belonging, often without conscious awareness. This issue of Architectural Design shows his engagement with debates shaping late twentieth‑century architecture.

Christopher Martin’s essay 'Second Chance' revisits the Prince of Wales’s 1987 Mansion House speech, his BBC film A Vision of Britain, and the 1989 V&A exhibition. McCulloch’s interest in these debates reflects his concern with human‑scale, context‑sensitive architecture. The Prince critiqued modernist redevelopment for erasing historic streets, squares and mixed‑use neighbourhoods, and argued for continuity, craft, and public engagement in design.

A bookmarked article, 'New Town Ordinances & Codes' by Duany, Plater‑Zyberk, and Chellman, likely noted by McCulloch because of links to another archived article by Duany, critiques regulations that prioritise traffic, parking, separated uses and low density. The Traditional Neighbourhood Ordinance they propose purports to reduce car dependence, and support social interaction, civic life, and a mix of housing and local commerce — principles McCulloch explored in his own work.

Richard Rogers’ 'Pulling Down the Prince' offers a counterpoint to A Vision of Britain, arguing that architecture reflects social, economic, and technological conditions. Traditions now revered were once radical. Rogers emphasises adaptability: buildings must change function while keeping coherence, a principle evident in McCulloch’s context‑sensitive design.

These perspectives intersect in McCulloch’s archives and practice. As Rogers notes, “once great centres of civic life have become jungles where the profiteer and the vehicle rule” (Architectural Design, 1989). McCulloch’s advocacy for walkable, mixed‑use communities and responsive design reveals an understanding of these issues that is practical and philosophical. This publication, as an artefact of his engagement, and in the context of 'Drawing Together', captures a moment in the ongoing conversation about continuity, adaptability, and civic life, showing why architecture, as McCulloch understood it, remains inseparable from the way we live.

The new year brought confirmation of ten re-established polytechnics across Aotearoa New Zealand, including SIT, Ara, EIT, NMIT, Toi Ohomai, Wintec, Unitec and MIT, Otago Polytechnic, UCOL and The Open Polytechnic. It’s a significant moment, but it also raises the question: what could autonomy in the regions enable?

Vocational training in the regions takes a community. Times have changed and so have the needs and aspirations of learners and industries. Industries are pivoting faster than ever, and expecting a centralised, siloed model of education and training to keep up is increasingly risky. Regional providers with local governance are far better placed to understand what is happening on the ground and to develop programmes and delivery modes that respond to real gaps in skills and capability.

While the regional institutions identified as sustainable will be relieved to continue this work, ten polytechnics alone will not fill the skills gaps across the country. Some regions will remain underserved. Learners can move or enrol in online qualifications, but attrition in remote programmes is high because the model simply does not work for many people. Onsite hands-on learning builds communities, and when it comes to work, having access to face-to-face industry and community networks who can support your learning journey is crucial.

One of the most visible gaps is for people already in work. Learning pathways are still largely designed for school leavers, who can dedicate months or years to full-time study. For those in full- or part-time work, often supporting families, this is rarely possible. After more than a decade in the sector, I have seen how limited the options are for people to grow or shift their skills in the places they live and work. We all can and should continue to drive our own learning, and access to online resources has never been greater, but the development of hands-on skills and capabilities that are relevant to regional contexts must be embedded in communities and workplaces. Learning is no longer a destination, as it was once viewed. Upskilling and retraining while in work are now fundamental to supporting thriving regions.

So how might newly announced regional autonomy begin to serve those who are currently underserved? Most regions will not see it as viable or desirable to encourage people to leave to train, nor is it practical for many to do so. Regions now have the chance to establish their own models for growth around identified gaps. There is a real opportunity to reimagine delivery so that learning is embedded in workplaces and local industries, with facilitated, blended training that fits around work rather than requiring people to step away from it. Learning and working life are intertwined, and regions are best placed to determine how skills development connects with their industries and communities.

If we are serious about thriving regions and sustainable local economies, learning must be designed and delivered to fit the lives of learners while strengthening the communities around them. Regional providers, industry partners, and communities can now work together to shape models of vocational learning that are accessible, practical, and deeply connected to local needs. This is how skills development can support both people and places, creating thriving communities where learning is part of everyday life.

I started my ‘formal’ tertiary education at the Dunedin School of Art, completing a four-year degree followed by a two-year masters. It sounds like a long time now, but at the time it was standard, and like all periods filled with activity, it flew by. I finished my degree and chose to continue straight into my masters because I felt I had more to learn, I was in the ‘zone’ in terms of navigating that learning environment, and I could already see how hard it was for those with greater financial commitments to step back into study.

What I also learned in art school is that learning never ends. The more you learn the less you know. That really did ring true for me. And although I have spent much of my life in learning institutions, learning itself is not confined to them. It can happen anywhere and at any time, and we are now in a moment when learning has never been more accessible. We can choose learning that fits with the contexts we are navigating.

Many institutions still treat learning as a destination, where you acquire a qualification which signals that you have arrived and will now naturally progress to your aspired place in the world. This does both learners and institutions a disservice, because generally a qualification is not a ticket or a pass to anything. Educational institutions often boast that qualifications result in better employment outcomes such as earning more in the long term. However, rather than the acquisition of a qualification, what really matters is the active pursuit of learning in whatever form that takes.

There are ongoing debates about the relevance of tertiary qualifications, especially in relation to how quickly graduates transition into work. This is an ongoing challenge for institutions whose funding models and historical ways of operating struggle to support the kind of agility the working world now demands. That does not mean there is no value in undertaking a qualification. When I later completed a PhD, I knew the credential mattered less than being supported to pursue research in the real world, and to keep learning as part of how I work.

Those who treat education as a destination, and who prioritise maintaining the status quo over learning, are inevitably steering themselves into irrelevance. You have never arrived. A qualification is not a ticket or a right to the working life you imagine. Lifelong learning is not something an institution gives you — it is something you choose, again and again, as the world, and your place within it, keeps changing.

When I was at art school, I lived off a student allowance, which meant a very lean life with little room for expenditure beyond rent, power, phone, and food. I didn’t have internet at home, or my own laptop. I made black coffee in a pot on the stove, later upgrading to a stovetop coffee brewer I found for $2 at an op shop. I slept on a mattress on the floor with a broken bed base, owned an old antique dressing table, and put cash into jars each week to make sure I could keep the power and phone on.

Most winters I froze and went to bed fully dressed, wearing a beanie and using two hot water bottles. My first flat was a concrete-block, two-bedroom unit with a one-bar heater. Each morning I woke to condensation streaming down the walls. I owned an old second-hand television that worked sometimes but had an ancient video player that worked just fine—aside from the occasional moment when I had to unscrew the top to rescue a chewed tape.

There was a shared washing machine with two tubs, requiring mid-cycle load swaps. I walked long distances to art school, to buy groceries, pay bills, and visit op shops, only occasionally taking the bus. I kept spare clothes in my locker at school because arriving soaked was not uncommon in Dunedin.

None of this felt unusual. And this isn’t a story about hardship—I was happy. I was making my own way in the world and had the opportunity to attend art school and learn from people I admired. I became an avid op shopper and attended auctions, amazed by how much could be acquired for so little.

I committed fully to painting and took every opportunity to do commissioned work: portraits of children, pets, houses, and gardens. When I started, I had two paintbrushes and three colours—black, white, and red. I made my own canvases at art school. Later, a local art supply store allowed me to open an account, paying $10 a week so I could gradually buy more brushes and colours. I painted constantly, developing strategies to work with what I had.

For a large-scale commission, I woke at 4am to paint for three hours before my flat mates woke. The canvases were too large for my bedroom, so I unpacked and repacked them daily.

I didn’t need much to begin. I worked for years with a 35mm camera a friend loaned me, bought 120mm cameras at auctions, and still use two old tripods—one bought for $15 thirty years ago, the other found abandoned.

Limitations became my greatest ally. The skills I learned served me well when I took my first paid role in the non-profit museum sector, where budgets covered little beyond salaries and modest programme costs. Fundraising was routine, and doing a lot with a little was simply how things were done.

Creativity thrives on constraint. Limitations force choices, sharpen focus, and build resilience. Working with less taught me how to begin, how to persist, and how to solve problems rather than wait for ideal conditions. Abundance, by contrast, can often be a hindrance to creativity, encouraging hesitation, distraction, or the pursuit of perfection. These lessons continue to inform my creative practice, reminding me that meaningful work rarely depends on having more but just on getting started.

Commission for Dunedin Hospital, 1999.