Introduction

While the momentum to shift design away from its reliance on “universal” concepts continues to gain bandwidth, this study suggests there is still work to be done with graduate students, who will advance the laudable skills and acumen that multiplicity offers design. In recent years, growing numbers of design institutes and practitioners have referred to inclusivity and diversity as politically, socially, and, where it suits them, economically beneficial. But implementation has yet to be considered on a broad scale. The merits of cultural diversity add to the capacity and capability of institutes to graduate globally competent citizens,¹ and this paper illustrates a pedagogical pathway that engages cultural acumen in a meaningful and authentic way to achieve this. This research introduces the Indigenous values and strategies imbued within visual-spatial languages, arguing they should, as a matter of historical correctness, be first and foremost acknowledged for their contributions to our aesthetic and built environs, and, secondly, valued for the renewed opportunities they offer design to recalibrate its cultural and ideological compass. This study aims to show that the inclusion of Indigenous tenets, specifically those of the Pacific region known as Moana,² is not as much of a cultural or pedagogical stretch as one at first might think. In fact, this knowledge is already tacit, albeit overlooked in our modernist-led curriculum. Drawing analogies between Indigenous visual-spatial strategies and the roots of modernism, this research elucidates not only the relevance but the opportunity Indigenous knowledge holds for design thinking and practice.

The predicament lies in the fact that, unlike traditional art and craft, design as a discipline developed well after the colonial period; as such, design researchers have tended to disregard Indigenous cultures as having little to offer it. In recent years, however, design’s increased demand for diversity has called for a re-evaluation of this paradigm. For example, in support of a shift away from the homogeny of standardization, Alain Findeli has posited that twenty-first century design should further “open up the scope of inquiry.”³ Supporting such calls and drawing upon the cultural diversity extant within Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design Innovation cohorts, this study presents course work developed to enable New Zealand design students to gain appreciation for culturally inspired visual-spatial languages and an understanding of what these can offer their thinking and praxis. The Pasifika ideology of Ta-vā (tā meaning time and vā meaning space), further supported by developing an understanding of teu la vā as a sacred and unbreakable connection and te ao Māori (the Māori worldview), are central to this work.

Within Ta-vā, Hūfanga 'Okusitino Māhina explains, “People are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backwards into the future, both taking place in the present, where the past and the future are constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present.”⁴ Māhina also introduces the concept of eternal relationships through teu le vā, explaining that: “All things, in nature, mind and society, stand in eternal relations of exchange.”⁵ A central tenet of the Māori worldview is the notion that time is non-linear in nature, explained with the proverb ka mua ki muri, meaning to walk backwards into the future and consider connections to both people and place.

By drawing a parallel between the historical trajectories of reductive graphic codes and holistic ideologies espoused by both Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) and the Bauhaus (1919–1933) and those imbued in te ao Māori, Ta-vā, and teu le vā, this study exposes the connections between Indigenous ideologies and Bauhaus-inspired modernist design education, arguing that the acknowledgement, inclusion, and reflection of Indigenous acumen should not be considered an interesting historical or cultural deviation, but as itself containing ideologies, strategies, and visual-spatial languages deeply rooted in and highly relevant to the enrichment of design today. By using Indigenous knowledge, our students have identified and visually expressed both tangible and intangible connections to both past, present, and future, investigating the historic or traditional meanings and methods attached to the symbolism or strategies they have identified, and discerning relevant methods for expressing culture in contemporary and collective contexts.

The Backdrop and New Insights to Design’s History

Ornament speaks to us and about us through both figurative and rhythmic languages.⁶ In the production of form, the visualization of narratives, and the expression of both symbolic and pragmatic meanings, ornament has always been a fundamental tool. But as an article of culture, it has also been misunderstood and misused. Aesthetic education has celebrated the thinking and work of Vitruvius (c. 90–c.20 BCE), Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), pointing to the centuries that ensued, when the use of ornament flourished, as a highpoint in the development of ornament’s formal vocabulary, through to the late nineteenth century, when its extravagant use caused ornament, along with cultural, religious, and historic visual references to ornamentation, to be called into question. Reacting to the excesses of the Rococo style, the horrors of mass-production, and the widening economic social divide, the roles and responsibilities of ornament began to be scrutinized by theorists such as Owen Jones (1809–1874) and John Ruskin (1819–1900). Throughout the later part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century Ruskin and Jones’ ideals attempted to imbue a more egalitarian and universal approach to education, one that would offer an understanding of aesthetic languages that was not owned or defined by class and ethnicity.

Subsequently, Adolf Loos (1870–1933) categorically scorned the use of ornament, labeling it degenerate and no less than a crime.⁷ Moreover, Loos’s criticism of “indigeneity as counteractive to the evolution of a modern culture devoid of primitive ornament”⁸ was among the earliest and most fanatical outbursts in the coming assault on ornament, leading to the elimination of ornament design from the curricula of schools of art and architecture.

One might argue that Loos’s argument was overly polemical. However, the political, personal, and economic discourse that besieged this period in design’s history reveals that despite his essay being an efficacious work of fiction rather than historical fact, his influence increased in the coming decades. So it seems opportune for this study to diverge away from the historical trajectory of modernism’s abolition of ornament to tread a not-so-teleological path illuminating a connection between Froebel’s theories, Ruskin and Jones’ manifestoes, the Bauhaus, and the visual spatial languages of Indigenous Pasifika and Māori cultures. To begin, Froebel’s instigation of aesthetic education informed Ruskin and Jones’ work, greatly contributing to the development of a modernist design pedagogy. Froebel was in turn inspired by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1847), and believed that incorporating simple visual and physical elements into pedagogy, alongside sensory learning, could achieve unity within struggling societies. Froebel thus approached education from both a biological and a spiritual perspective, formulating a reductive graphic code based on a sparse grammar of lines and curves, acknowledging relationships within space and building his pedagogy upon holistic, sensory, spatial, and social ideals. His work, like the Māori world view te ao Māori, embraced all things in nature as connected, offering an early linkage between Western thought systems and Indigenous knowledge. Froebel introduced—more correctly, re-introduced—values that emphasized, nurtured, and respected the individual, acknowledging their ongoing or intergenerational connection to a larger collective, whether family, community, or environment. As an aside, Buckminster Fuller would later reference this relationship within his Spaceship Earth concept.⁹

Froebel’s pedagogy has been credited as having had a direct influence on the inception of modernism; influencing Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and his Vorkurs studio masters—Johannes Itten (1888–1967), Paul Klee (1879–1940), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (1888–1967). It also influenced Le Corbusier, (1833–1965) Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), and Charles Eames (1907–1978), to name a few of the grandfathers of Western aesthetics.¹⁰ Froebel’s holistic, abstract theories had previously given traction to the reform programs of Ruskin and Jones, and were in the twentieth century developed by Itten and Moholy-Nagy at the historical Bauhaus, as well as inspiring the endeavors of Bauhaus émigrés after the school’s closure.¹¹ These men have been credited with fashioning the bedrock of the modernist aesthetic and its pedagogy. Informing my research focus is the fact that, quixotically, neither the fields of architecture nor design in this period ever acknowledged the existence, influence, or impact of Indigenous visual spatial strategies, which predate the codified visual expressions and holistic strategies Froebel, Ruskin, and Jones developed as an expression of their discontent with the irrational, excessive, and visually meaningless. (Fig 1)

Correlations between Indigenous and Modernist: Reductive Codes.

Froebel introduced a codified and sparse visual grammar to express the abstracted essence of form and space. The “Gifts,” as his tools were called, encouraged physical experimentation through the principles of connection and divisibility.¹² Shifting from simple to complex and between two and three dimensions, the Gifts created inter-connected spatial relationships. Central to my argument is the resemblance Froebel’s aesthetic codes have with the visual grammars observed in P.V. Kirch’s 1997 work, The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World—identifiable, for instance, in the dentate stamping on Lapita pottery from as far back as 1500 BC.¹³ This correlation, I posit, illuminates the first link between traditional Indigenous practices and what aesthetic educators ironically refer to as the inception of the modernist approach (Fig 2). In The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones references numerous ancient cultures, taking from them much of his inspiration for unraveling theories around visual abstraction. Half a century later, Eugene Grasset (1845–1917), the French reformist and an inspiration to Johannes Itten, also affirmed the value of Indigenous knowledge, stating: “The return to the primitive sources of simple geometry is a certain guarantee of the soundness of our method.”¹⁴ Jones’ work depicted the abstracted graphics, flat patterning, and ornamentation of many cultures whose aesthetic strategies were subsequently adapted, albeit without recognition, into modernist strategies. Although, sadly, Jones referred to Indigenous decorative work as having been done by “savages,” unlike his contemporaries he readily acknowledged the extraordinary nature of Indigenous knowledge within design,¹⁵ stating: “The eye of the savage accustomed only to look upon Nature’s harmonies, would readily enter into the perception of the true balance both of form and colour.”¹⁶

Space as a Relationship

The second correlation between modernist and Indigenous works is their shared understanding of space as a relationship. For Froebel, connections within space existed, and he believed nurturing these connections was important. Using the second Gift, Froebel used spinning to show how form is perceived to change when treated differently within space. From static in space to spinning in space, a sphere becomes a cylinder. In this way Froebel described appearance and illustrated perception. His simple demonstration illustrated how separate physical entities can be connected by lasting symbiotic, yet fluid, relationships; attributes summarized by Brosterman thusly: “Froebel, in a sleight-of-hand worthy of a resourceful magician, created the ultimate gambit—a straightforward demonstration of cosmic mutuality and universal interconnectedness that even a child could understand.”¹⁷ In contrast to the Western paradigm of space as a separator, the ideals embedded in the Pasifika constructs of Ta-vā, and teu le vā, as with Froebel’s Gifts, also emphasize connectivity, his exercises expressing, as do Ta-vā and teu le vā, intangible yet present immaterial connections, sensory perception, and a shared understanding. Samoan-born author Albert Wendt explains vā as containing symbiotic relationships that as a consequence of nurturing and respect grow and change over time. “Vā is the space between, the in-betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but, space that relates, that vā holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-in-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.”¹⁸ Echoing this, Amiria Henare explains that within te ao Māori, “people and things have close relations that collapse spatial and temporal boundaries.”¹⁹

As important contributors to this synergy—motivated in this context by twentieth century industrialization— in their respective iterations of the Bauhaus preliminary year (Vorkurs) pedagogy, Itten and Moholy-Nagy, two of the most influential Bauhaus masters, shaped design pedagogies which continue to be central to design instruction. Itten’s Vorkurs methodology laid a pathway for individual exploration and analysis of one’s self, nature, and the world of artistic creativity within the context of a collective.²⁰ This was not done to produce a common style, as has been wrongly interpreted within mid-twentieth century American architectural and design education, but to cultivate shared understanding. Itten’s tenets, like Ta-vā and teu le vā, offered students the ability to see, synthesize emotion, and connect with their physical senses in order to both experience and articulate the essence of form and space. “The essence of a material is its effect of space, the immaterial,” Itten explained. “Space is the material of the immaterial.”²¹

Lázsló Moholy-Nagy’s spatial experiments and social ideology also possess a demonstrable correlation to Indigenous knowledge. After his emigration to the United States in 1933, Moholy-Nagy attempted to disseminate his holistic and inclusive tenets at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy wrote: “Today spatial design is an interweaving of shapes: shapes which are ordered into certain well defined, if invisible, space relations; shapes which represent the fluctuating play of tension and force.”²² At this time, Walter Gropius, then teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design, praised Moholy-Nagy’s conception of space, saying it “opened design considerations to the problems of the fourth dimension and a modern conception of space.”²³ Peder Anker, a historian of environmental sciences, states that “Moholy-Nagy believed the future held the possibility of a new harmony between humans and their earthly environment.”²⁴ Supporting this, Findeli also applauds Moholy-Nagy’s assertion that “the key to our age is to be able to see everything in relationship.”²⁵ Again, Moholy-Nagy’s ideas resemble te ao Māori and Ta-vā in that both speak to a spiritual unity that continuously binds people with place through an understanding and respect for space, and all that exists in it and between entities. The energy and forces held within the Earth and the symbiotic relationships between the planet and humans are implicitly understood within Moana cultures. With equal tribute, I suggest that Māhina’s Tā-vā, and te ao Māori sit comfortably alongside Moholy-Nagy’s work, and also reveal further correlations with Froebel, Itten, and the Bauhaus as a whole. Despite the laudable efforts of those Bauhaüslers who emigrated to the United States, their tenets were not adopted wholesale. Only the reductive code, the universal aesthetic, and a perpetual desire to unite creative practice with advancing technologies—predominantly motivated by financial reward—remained of the Bauhaus pedagogy following its American translation. I posit that what was diminished or completely lost in later adaptations of both Itten and Moholy-Nagy’s teachings were the notions each had developed within their respective appreciations of space with regards to symbiotic relationships, the interconnectedness of humans with nature, and an appreciation of connectivity persisting across time.

Connecting Indigenous Knowledge and Design Pedagogy

The Māori ideologies of Ta-vā, teu le vā, and te ao ensure that the relationships formed between people, nature, and objects is reciprocal. But they also share a nexus, being that space holds physical, emotional, and perceptual qualities. To celebrate Hirini Moko Mead’s proclamation of Māori knowledge as having finally “come out of hiding and now in the bright light of day,”²⁶ and inspired by design theorist Fern Lerner’s assertion that cultural diversity, provided that new aesthetic languages are not constricted or impeded, offers new agency to design,²⁷ design course work was developed at Victoria University School of Design that integrated the legacy of Māori connectivity through both personal, cultural, and discipline-specific histories. First Year design students were asked to construct visual articulations expressing their emotional connection to themselves, their genealogy (whakapapa), and their cultural heritage. Students then used strategies of repetition, rotation, and reflection employed in the traditional visual narrative works of Māori tukutuku and Pasifika tapa (Fig 3) to develop collective juxtapositions. Using simple elements and forms of the reductive aesthetic codes that, as I have asserted, bind Indigenous visual languages to Froebel’s Gifts, the Bauhaus, and the modernist aesthetic—along with an understanding of te ao Maori, Ta-vā, and teu le vā that allowed each student to abstractly and critically depict the in-between space of culture—the project assignments required students to express and reveal themselves through their culture, applying their understanding of Indigenous symbols to visual strategies so as to illustrate their connection to a greater cultural whole.

This exercise helped students to develop an appreciation of the relationships illustrated within their compositions which become legible as a result of these strategies, enabling them to experience connectivity on multiple scales and to consider their work as both juxtaposed with and connected to something larger than themselves. The conceptual process students undertook was intended to encourage them to see themselves as participants within and guardians of complex systems connected to both people and place. In a second exercise demonstrating the design process of iteration, students were instructed to express teu le vā as a family tree, using this structure to iterate their previous design work. Supported by Jones’ assertion that within Indigenous ornament the true balance of both form and color could always be found,²⁸ and armed with an appreciation that people and cultures arrange time and space in diverse ways, students investigated Māori and Pasifika practices where time and space are marked through the use of repetition and symmetry. Symbols designed referenced historical and contemporary cultures alike, representing Indigenous narratives that identify and reflect which culture—or cultures—students felt tethered to. Using a combination of analog and digital technologies for pattern generation, students continued to expand on their understanding of iteration and connection.

The patterns illustrated in Fig 4, at the right of the individual symbol (top far left) are adaptations representing different degrees to which the individual feels a part of larger collectives. The first pattern expresses the student’s relationship with their family, or tutorial group of about 20 students. This student has located the individual symbol of themselves as a large and recognizable element within a group of similar elements. The second pattern represents the student within their class, numbering approximately 120 students. This particular pattern shows less distinction between each element, but its creator expressed in their reflective summary that the scale still enabled a place for individuality. The third and fourth patterns represent the entire first-year design cohort of over 250 students. It seemingly engulfs distinctiveness, but hints of individual uniqueness are still visible. The repetition and fluidity of the pattern reads as a harmonious connection among what the student summarized as “kindred spirits.”

Although efforts are presently being made, design is still in need of a pedagogical approach engendering diverse understandings of time and space. I have argued in this essay for engaging with the ideological meanings and narratives embedded in Indigenous visual-spatial languages and strategies, in combination with acknowledging their relevance and contribution to our aesthetic appreciation and built environs, so that the assimilation of Indigenous culture within contemporary design education can be meaningfully realized. By doing so, one outcome will be the matriculation of a more diverse and globally proficient body of design students. Equally important, these graduates will value and disclose—using an enriched visual/spatial vocabulary—the connectivity between humans and nature, between humans and objects, and between individuals within the broader human community. As a Froebel alumni and one of Moholy-Nagy’s kindred spirits—and I would also hope to Māhina—Buckminster Fuller once put forward a hopeful estimation of the intersubjective nature of space. “Space is irrelevant,” he said. “There is no space, there are only relationships.”²⁹