Te Reo Tohunga Achievement Award

Designed by Emily Huang, Phillip Kosetatino, and Emma Tiplady

#HealthyCommunities

Our initial challenge as a group was to design to improve a community by following a design process to develop a service design strategy. We chose to focus on the aspect of culture in a community, and more specifically cultural diversity in New Zealand. After some further thought as a group, we decided to further narrow into the topic of Maori language and its culture in Aotearoa. There are many aspects of healthy communities, which together form a holistic definition; A healthy community is one where people with diverse backgrounds, interests and skills are able to function and thrive together, practising aspects of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. The context of culture is an important aspect of living in a healthy community, and our objectives of this project were to design a service strategy to help normalise the use of Te Reo Maori in everyday life in Aotearoa.

To explore and find our all our combined existing knowledge, we together completed an Ecosystems Map, on the topic of the Maori Language Movement (A movement designed to celebrate Maori culture and language through things such as dance, waiatas etc) to get an understanding of how it affected the existing community.

This ecosystem map helped us to define and develop our problem. From here we were able to dive deeper into our problem by examining the different aspects. After this we then moved on to completing a problem space map, in which we were able to evaluate the data that we found through research. An interesting finding we discovered which helped to drive our project was that: people who are not ethnically Maori tend to have little to no motivation to learn the language and/or culture of the Maori people. We realised that the lack of education of Te Reo in secondary and tertiary environments was a significant cause of this.

After completing these, we then conduced some primary and secondary research on the topic we focused in on: Te Reo Language and its use in our New Zealand community.

After completing the research we moved on to generating our first ideas using an Ideation template. We used this template to ideate, brainstorm, evaluate and also produce strategy concepts.

Alongside this, we completed a value proposition canvas, to examine the chosen strategy and its effect on the community.

Our final tools, the journey map and then blueprint, were essential in locking in our design strategy. We then presented our final strategy; the Te Reo Tohunga Achievement Award.

The Final Design Strategy: Te Reo Tohunga

Te Reo Tohunga is an award which is for the learning of Te Reo and the commitment shown to embracing the language in Aotearoa.

It is an academic qualification approved by 'Ministry of Education'.

"A step towards achieving kanorau (diversity), whakauru (inclusivity) and hauora (health) in Aotearoa."

This design strategy targets the youth of NZ, focusing on students in secondary school years 11-13. This award must completed in a 1 year duration, and certified by a registered teacher. This award is aiming to be nationally recognisable, so that the work completed carries the student past high school and into the workforce. The design strategy would require a team of volunteers to speak at schools, to help educate and promote the award among schools around New Zealand. Schools would then be given resources for the award, and signups available either online or in person at the end of said presentations. Each school needs a certified teacher/s to guide students in the completion of the award. Through this experienced training and dedication, students will be able to thrive in this award through the guidance from their teachers.

The award consists of completing a variety of tasks, such as speech dialogue, attending a service, and the Te Reo subtitles task. These tasks are all targeted to help grow a specific area of knowledge about the language and culture of Te Reo. After each task is completed, the allocated points to this task will be given to the student. A student must have a certain number of 'points' to achieve this award.

The next step in the design strategy is the award certification process, which allows teachers to sign off all tasks and put the student on the list of certified Te Reo Tohunga Achievers.

The Impact:

Our design strategy will provide opportunities for our youth to be educated in Te Reo Maori. The award will create a systematic approach of decomposing the uncomfortable culture around people that are not Maori speaking Te Reo in hopes to further normalise the native language of New Zealand. This design is an easy, accessible and an achievable recognition that has an ongoing positive impact after graduating high school.

In conclusion, this service design strategy design process was both thoroughly interesting and rewarding to learn about. By using all the different tools provided to us, we were able to embrace the process and create an outcome that we were proud of. Our final design strategy has potential if developed further, and working alongside Emily and Phillip was such a great learning experience, both in terms of general experiences with group work and working alongside such talented and intuitive students.