Our Everyday: The Intangible Yet Tangible Tensions Between Commonality, Contrast, and Co-operation within Design Education.

As with commoning, the principles of equality, cooperation, and self-determination are central to the cultivation of inclusion and equity within Te Kura Hoahoa, The School of Design Innovation, Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Importantly and specific to our School, we are guided by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, [The Treaty of Waitangi] in which our responsibilities to Māori as a principal partner in that Treaty, are not to blend each by cooperation into common-ness but to acknowledge each as distinctive and equal entities. Embracing this mahi [mission], this research asserts that understandings of people, place, and space, offered from within Māori ways of being, have much to offer our attempts to shift design from the outmoded Euro-Anglo-American paradigms and hierarchies still modelled within the discipline, to one where we embrace more than co-operation and equity, but the intangible yet tangible tensions of commonality and contrast. Our proposal is that the guiding principles of equality, cooperation, and self-determination highlighted within commoning, and The School of Design Innovation, are better articulated when rooted in tikanga values [Māori values and protocols]. We suggest that akoranga, the fluidity and longevity of reciprocity, whanaungatanga, authentic connections, manaakitanga, the care we offer, and encapsulates not only what is known but acknowledges the experiences and history of how it is known, and kaitiakitanga, active rather than passive guardianship and confers responsibilities, not rights ‘to’ people and place as those values. These understandings, we assert, are central to any shifts design pedagogy or praxis takes to move from the central creed of universality, historically used to join us all as one, until now. This paper focuses on Te Ao Māori, the Māori worldview, and a supporting Pasifika ideology, Ta-Vā. Both speak to the acknowledgement and negotiation of relationships through connectivity of people, place, space, and time. We argue that the values upheld in design and within commoning, of power sharing, equality, cooperation, and self-determination are best enabled when deeply rooted in shared values, tikanga Māori. We hope to illustrate akoranga, whanaungatanga, manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga as facilitators of rangatiratanga [self-determination], in our use of them our guides.