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The performance of a diverse cohort of civil engineering students at Unitec Institute of Technology (2010-2019)
No full textThe growth in international students over the past decade, and large-scale immigration into the Auckland area, have both contributed to a rapidly diversifying student cohort at Unitec New Zealand. In the period 2010 to 2019, 1856 distinct students studied civil engineering at Unitec. Within the domestic cohort alone, these students came from 39 different nationalities, and at least 28 different ethnic groups. The topic of this paper is how educational performance is associated with various demographic characteristics, particularly in respect of nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, part-time or full-time study, and activity prior to study. Particularly important are the findings pertaining to the New Zealand Government’s designated priority groups. Māori in civil engineering are underrepresented in relation to their proportion of the population in West Auckland, but are performing well academically, whereas domestic Pasifika, who are well represented, are falling behind other groups in terms of educational performance. International students, on the whole, academically outperform domestic students. The article concludes with 17 key findings, and a recommendation that future research focuses on students who drop out of civil engineering during their first year of study. An enhanced understanding of this group of students has the potential to significantly improve educational performance indicators for civil engineering, starting from when students begin their first semester of study in the discipline
Reconnecting a city’s forgotten identity: The revival of a lost cultural identity through a mixed-use museum project
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION
How can a community-scale museum facility be used to re-establish Guangzhou’s diminishing cultural identity?
ABSTRACT
The culture and identity of a city has always been directly connected to the people who dwell within, where their creations reflect their learnings and experience throughout history into a singular object. When the old gets replaced with new generations, all that is left to remain and reference the past is through the leftover objects holding the history of their ancestors. In an architectural sense, the historic structures of a specific context display all the memory and knowledge of the past in a physical manner. It offers perspectives into the lives of the city’s prior generations who built structures reflective of their culture and identity at a specific time period, creating a series of windows into the past through each historic site. However, the implication of the loss of a historic site, whether deliberately or otherwise, results in a sever of the link in the cultural identity between current and past generations. A complete loss of historic sites would lead to an eventual disconnect of the city’s occupants from the founding identity forged from their own ancestors and history.
The economic growth sprouted from China’s market reforms during the 1980’s saw the nation undergo an era of urban development further spurred by the rapid increase in population size occurring at the same time. The introduction of new modern building materials and technologies allowed for unprecedented urbanisation required to meet the demands of China’s various cities, making the permanent switch of the Chinese original village-like landscape for one of dense high-rise and residential complexes, with architects racing to utilise the newest technologies unbound by traditional construction. During this era of great development, we can observe a deliberate destruction of historic sites to make space for modern solutions which often failed to integrate or acknowledge the inherent cultural values held within the demolished structures.
The excitement of the modern age eventually faded off to reveal the resulting amalgamation of ‘modern’ projects, unreflective of each location’s identity causing the visual composition of China’s cities to melt into an indistinguishable urban sprawl. This effect was noticed by many contemporary Chinese architects who attempted to rectify the identity crisis through locally inspired projects, often recreating the cultural link through communal inclusion and motifs indicative of a given context’s history; thus reflecting the true nature of the city and its people.
This project looks into the city of Guangzhou, which experienced the rapid urbanisation occurring throughout China which resulted in much of the city’s historic towns demolished for a layer of ‘modern’ construction. Guangzhou’s unique identity as a significant port trading city - the initial contact point between Western foreign powers to China- was lost for uninspired urban developments. Where the condensed nature of the modern city has introduced the importance of open communal spaces, this project aims to implement a museum facility into an existing public space while incorporating and improving the values of the chosen site. The resulting project serves a multi-purpose function of integrating local communities to the new project structures while using lessons learnt by prior projects from various architects and literature as a foundation towards a culturally responsive design, incorporating aspects of climate specific design. The goal will be to provide an example of cultural identity revival through community-supportive design.
Site: Yuexiu Park, Guangzhou, Chin
Moving through stories: Creating and realizing expectations in architecture
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION
How can the distinction between exterior and interior be leveraged to create a positive architectural dissonance and improve our emotional response to architecture?
ABSTRACT
Buildings are made of exteriors and interiors, and the distinction between them is the substance of architecture. This project seeks to better understand how exercising control over exteriors and interiors can improve the way humans feel about the buildings we interact with. This document details the inspiration, background research, and design moves explored and implemented during these investigations, as well as the obstacles encountered during the design process.
The primary intellectual and emotional inspiration for the design output of this project is the fictional Library of Babel, first imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941. Borges’s work is underpinned by research ranging from early modernist theory to modern-day writings about the architecture of experience. It is the combination of this inspiration and the totality of the research that informs the design of an oral history library in Heron Park, West Auckland.
This process generates an oral history library—built on a hexagonal grid mimicking Borges’s universe of galleries—with an exterior that hides the greater complexity of the interior, and an interior that leverages the expectations created by the exterior to generate architectural dissonance.
The final design outcome is an investigation into how a building can encourage and affect dissonance by controlling visitors’ movements through a building, and how increasing this dissonance can improve the engagement with—and the emotional response to architecture.
SITE: Heron Park, Auckland, New Zaelan
The impact of enrichment on the behaviour of kea (Nestor notabilis) at Auckland Zoo
No full textKea (Nestor notabilis) have evolved in the challenging alpine environment of the South Island of New Zealand (Young et al., 2012). They are a generalist species, lending to an ability to adapt to changing conditions in a harsh environment (Martini et al., 2021). Like other parrots, they are social. Adaptability and sociality have been linked to intelligence, with kea known for being particularly inquisitive and excellent problem solvers (Goodman et al., 2018). While this serves them well in the wild, the captive environment presents fewer challenges, which can result in boredom and welfare issues (Skibiel et al., 2007). Enrichment can be applied to increase the complexity of and add challenge to the captive environment (Vinhas & Oliva, 2016)
Developing best practice guidelines in designing physical learning environments for students with complex needs
No full textADDED TITLE
Our place, our potential: Navigating the design process of learning environments for students with additional needs
ABSTRACT
This thesis explored the planning and design processes of learning areas for students with additional needs in Aotearoa New Zealand. The central case study was Blomfield Special School’s new two-classroom satellite unit at Oromahoe School in Northland. The aim of my research was to explore pedagogical practices, school property design, and how students with additional needs interact with physical learning environments so we could better support our children (tamariki) to discover and reach their potential.
Flexibility and safety were two key aspects underpinning nearly all design features. Flexibility comes from having enough space and a well-designed layout with multipurpose-zones, flow between indoors and outdoors, moveable furniture and equipment, and operable-walls or ranch sliders. Safety involves secure facilities and outdoor spaces, robust building material and furniture, careful placement of glass, line-of-sight for passive supervision, and areas for teaching and learning with low sensory and “crash and bash” zones.
When ākonga feel safe they can engage in learning that is personalised, inclusive, culturally responsive and fun. The MoE calculates specific entitlements for every new-build or renovations, so making the most of each square metre, and consultation between schools, architects, the MoE and local communities is crucial. Good designs work well for all students, not just those with complex or additional needs so the findings of this report are applicable to all schools
Keynote presentation: Reducing construction plastic waste to landfill : Making gold from straw!
No full textThe issue - construction waste
Plastic waste
Waste auditing
Plastic type
Plastic uses
Novel solutions
Difficult wastes
Hazardous wastes
On-site separation
Plastics audits catalogues
Holistic management decision tree
Future wor
Impacts of migration on Pacific diaspora communities in New Zealand and on the island countries of Samoa, Niue and Tonga
No full text• Migration
• Pacific diaspora in NZ
• Impact of migration on diaspora in NZ
• MIRAB economies
• Narratives of migratio
Experiments in the transient
No full textThe Hikurangi Subduction Zone is located off the east coast of New Zealand and is responsible for powerful earthquakes, land upheaval, and tsunami. This project is situated in the Māhia Peninsula, which is significant from both cultural and scientific perspectives. Through repeated visits to Māhia, it became evident to me that simply taking photos of this place was not going to be enough to convey its geologic intensity and the processes that shape the landscape. As a result, I embarked upon a shift from traditional landscape photography towards a practice that encompassed a collaborative approach; one that involved working with the agency of the natural elements present in this Miocene landscape.
My research question emerged: ‘How can photography extend the limits of its optical boundaries to engage with and reveal non-visual elements of the landscape?’
The experimental methods developed in the course of my practice resulted in a new understanding of the way in which certain dynamical processes within natural systems are echoed in the interactions between these elements and the photographic c-print. The resulting body of work is ‘Experiments in the Transient’
Whakatupua te rito: Improving the experiences of postgraduate tauira Māori within vocational education
No full textWHY THIS STUDY?
Māori students generally do not attain the same levels of tertiary success as Pākehā New Zealanders across all levels of higher education including postgraduate study (Richardson, 2018).
Chauvel and Rean (2012) in their assessment of this scholarship maintain, however, that the prevailing focus of the literature is on school to university transitions with a particular focus on the university environment. As they suggest “there is little information available in recent literature about the contribution of TEOs (tertiary education organisations) to the advancement of Māori research and knowledge as well as approaches that have worked well to successfully engage learners at higher levels of study” (p. 71-72)
• The importance of the next generation of Māori researchers/practitioners
• Significant change in vocational education in Aotearoa where VE is being reimagined
• The voices of postgraduate tauira Māori need to be included
• Our own experience working alongside tauria Māoru at PG level
Key insight: Kaupapa Māori expertise and ‘Postgraduate students as experts
Conservative management of symptomatic degenerative and isthmic spondylolisthesis in adults: A scoping review
No full textWith Lower Back Pain (LBP) affecting a large proportion of the population at one point in their life, it is important to explore the potential causes of such pain. Under the umbrella term of LBP, there is Spondylolisthesis (SPL) which affects around a tenth of the population. With such a proportion of the population being affected by the condition, it is important to explore and be aware of the different conservative management options available.
The following thesis has been separated into four sections. The first section is a literature review which provides important background knowledge to understand the anatomy of the lumbar spine and how it relates to the progression of SPL. The literature review also provides key definitions to better understand SPL, a broad background of the models of pain, LBP, epidemiology and clinical symptoms of SPL. It also explores the different management interventions available for SPL and how they may benefit individuals with SPL.
The second section outlines the methodology that is used in this thesis. It provides a background of scoping reviews and compares them to the more well-known systematic reviews. Subsequently, the rationale, aims, and objectives of this scoping review are discussed. Finally, the methodological framework is outlined and explored within the context of this scoping review.
Section three contains a manuscript of the present study formatted for submission to the Spine Journal for publication. The manuscript provides a detailed account of the methods used to identify the articles in this scoping review. It follows on to provide the detailed findings identified during the charting of the information. Section three finishes with an in-depth discussion of the three emerging themes from the literature. The last section of this document comprises all the appended resources, including evidence such as the Unitec Ethics exemption approval and details around the characteristics of the studies included. To promote transparency during the review process and prevent duplication, the scoping review protocol was developed and registered on the Open Science Framework websit