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Immigration New Zealand
Wellington, April 16, 2017
What distinguishes New Zealand design? While it is impossible to generalise about the broad span of New Zealand design, there are symbols and colour palates that appeal to our sense of national identity.
There are symbols that stand in for Kiwiness: the Kiwi, the Jandal, the Pohutukawa in bloom. There are colour palates that we tend to prefer, often blue and green, referencing the clean, green image that is part of our national self-image, or, the use of white on black, referencing the prowess of the All Blacks rugby team.
Other nations have their own distinctive preferences.
Preference for Black
For Kiwis, black conveys power, authority, sophistication and national patriotism. But in China, black would never be used as a background colour or to frame a photograph: it is too strongly associated with death, funerals and bad luck.
“I would only use black and white as a design choice with a great deal of soul searching,” says Lee Jensen, a lecturer at the School of Design at Massey University.
Back when New Zealand was a less culturally diverse nation, considerations like these did not matter very much if you were communicating within New Zealand.
Changing Population
But the composition of the population is changing. In 2013, 12.2% of New Zealanders identified themselves as ethnically Asian; according to Statistics New Zealand projections, by 2038 it will be 20.9%.
We need to become more culturally aware in the way we communicate.
For Jensen, this means that more emphasis than ever must be placed on the design process: on research, consultation and testing.
“When we teach our students, we can’t equip them with an understanding of how every culture deals with design, but we can send them out there with the ability to ask the right questions.”
The ActivAsian example
Auckland’s North Shore is at the forefront of demographic change in New Zealand.
While Statistics New Zealand has projected that by 2038, around 20% of the New Zealand population will be Asian, on the North Shore region, the figure has already passed 24%.
So, when Jenny Lim of Harbour Sport was asked to promote the sports participation programme ActivAsian to parents Chinese and Korean communities, which are the programme’s targets she set out to make sure that the messaging and the presentation were tailored to their cultural values and design preferences.
Photo Caption:
The Chinese-language ActivAsian promotional brochure uses the culturally auspicious colours of red and yellow.
Article and Photo from Immigration New Zealand (Settlement Actionz)
