Christchurch: An emerging center for

 Christchurch: An emerging center for innovation

 Creative minds in Christchurch are blending Māori culture and technology 

to create unique outcomes

Traditionally known as “the garden city”, Christchurch seems to have reinvented itself with an uprise in technological innovation. Making world-first strides in fields such as virtual reality, robotics, and anxiety and phobia-based exposure therapy.

In a city sparkling with modern buildings designed post-earthquake, the environment is perfect for creativity, and individuals such as Adam Hutchinson, Founder, oVRcome have used it to their advantage. Hutchinson has created a virtual reality app that helps people to overcome phobias and anxieties, using his own experience of social anxiety from when he was younger.

From fear of heights filmed on cliffs around Sumner, to fear of spiders filmed with tarantulas in Canterbury museum and access to Christchurch Airport for fear of flying, the app uses real life situations and locations to combat the anxiety. The beautiful New Zealand landscapes are the perfect backdrop for this exposure therapy.

Hutchinson said, “Christchurch is an amazing place to have a start-up, and, in my experience, you get so much support from Canterbury organizations to help grow. All it takes is an email and they’re happy to support you to come in and film. We know that we’re developing technology here that people all around the world are going to benefit from.”

Nestled in the heart of the University of Canterbury campus, the HIT Lab is unassuming in its appearance. Yet inside, world first initiatives are being built through a human centered approach to technology. Designing solutions around people rather than the application is how PhD student Rory Clifford works with Fire & Emergency NZ.

Clifford provides tools that virtually replicate the stress of a real-life fire situation so the firefighting team can increase their training before big wildfires happen.

Clifford said, “I think my Māori background has given me an amazing ability to connect with people, to manaakitanga (welcome), whakawhanaunatanga (make connections and relate to people) and establish positive relationships. It’s important to understand how other cultures work when working with different organizations.”

Clifford’s next project is called Marae Aotea, digitizing marae in New Zealand and capturing stories from kaumatua, or Māori elders, to redeliver virtually and keep them alive through future generations.

Blending Māori culture into the tech scene continues on the other side of Christchurch at Kaupapa Māori digital creative agency, Maui Studios Aotearoa. 

 

CEO Vincent Egan and Creative Director Madison ‘Mads’ Henry Ryan sought inspiration from Māori mythology for the title of their company, as Maui is looked at as an innovator and blazes his own path to overcome adversity. It’s a fitting vision for a Christchurch based company with creative decisions informed by their background.

“Our work is infused with our life force and people can feel that with the work we create,” Mads says. “The creatives outcomes have a Māori flavour to it. We have always been taught that who we are is imbued throughout everything we do. Because of our Māoritanga (Māori way of life) we can create unique outcomes that you don’t see too much of. This also speaks to the uniqueness of the content we’re creating.”

One of their current projects titled Sanctuary (www.sanctuary.maori.nz) transforms stories that are traditionally shared orally from kaumatua, or elders in Māori culture, into creative digital designs that continue to exist as people pass on.

Additional Information

Tourism New Zealand is the organisation responsible for marketing New Zealand as an international visitor destination.

For more information, kindly check:

• Website: newzealand.com/in
• Hashtags: #NZmustdo    
  

Meet the native New Zealand birds who

Meet the native New Zealand birds who have their own tales of lockdown

The five passengers on the Air New Zealand flight from Christchurch to Wellington had an attitude – and they liked to yell like juveniles who were being chaperoned and treated with the utmost care.

They were high-value clientele who had been bundled into two darkened wooden boxes, placed delicately inside the cabin of a near empty airplane, and transported far from where they were born. This was a different kind of contactless delivery.

The tūturuatu (shore plover birds) may have had reason to be grumpy, but it was also a race against time. During New Zealand’s level four lockdown, there was hardly anyone flying. The skies were quiet as the country settled into a new reality, where long-distance travel was only for “essential services”. But the survival of these birds, which usually soar under the radar of New Zealand’s national consciousness, was essential.

Only 250 of the little shore birds remain, making them one of the most critically endangered birds. They were first sighted in the early 1800’s on Cook’s second voyage. Unfortunately, by the 1870’s cats and rats had caused the birds to vanish from mainland coasts. For more than a 100 years, the remote island of Rangatira, in the Chathams archipelago to the east of the South Island, had the only known population.

“They are little birds with attitude,” says Dave Houston from The Department of Conservation “They are unique to New Zealand and they don’t really have close relatives as they are real Kiwi birds.”

“They are not shy,” Houston says. “They rush up to interesting things, like predators, to say hello. And they strongly defend their territories which is why they were on that lonely flight in the first place. When tūturuatu get older, they become like aggressive teenagers. With that come stress-related illnesses, so these teenagers needed their space.”

The Air New Zealand staff dutifully cared for them after which, they were picked up at the Wellington Airport and transported to the coast, where they hopped aboard a ferry and made their way to their new home, safe and sound.

Birds at Zealandia urban sanctuary in Wellington

The birds at Zealandia in Wellington also quickly settled into a new routine. In level four of the lockdown, there was nobody around. They had gone from seeing dozens of people a day, meandering through the wildlife reserve’s myriad paths, to only having one ranger going about their duties.

“We had to scale back to what were the bare essentials to make sure the wildlife was safe and well,” says head ranger Ellen Irwin.

It was not long after that these lone rangers started to notice something different in the behaviour of its inhabitants. As they were riding around the park on their quad bikes, they would have visitors – korimako (New Zealand bellbirds) and toutouwai (New Zealand robin) who were landing on the handle bars to say hello. “That has never happened before,” says Irwin.

“They were pretty interested,” says Irwin. “It's a pretty cool experience to have them land that close and check you out. The titipounamu (riflemen) would come down to eye level with the rangers as they passed.”

She also said it’s likely the change of place made the birds, curious. They may have become used to not seeing anyone in the valley during lockdown, so when a ranger did come through, it was something they had to check out. The phenomenon occurred across the country. Irwin says, “we received emails from all over New Zealand, from people who were revelling in seeing birds in their neighbourhoods.”

A quarter of New Zealand’s birds are found nowhere else on the planet and the country has become a world leader in bringing species back from the brink of extinction through a series of recovery programmes involving different styles of intervention. More than 30 percent of New Zealand’s land has been set aside in national parks, reserves and special heritage sites to preserve the country’s ecological heritage.

New Zealand is already becoming an ecosystem booming with the songs of rare birds and species on the planet. It’s arguably a tiny bright spot in a wash of conservation gloom, a sanctuary for a nation’s beloved species, and a place that proves Homo sapiens don’t have to only destroy nature – maybe they can create it, too.