Some of the postcards produced by Open Lab during Semi-Permanent.

One of the 500 images in the study of Asian language signage now common in some Auckland suburbs.

Massey University College of Sciences head Professor Robert Anderson with Victorian
Member of Parliament David Southwick at the No.4 dairy farm

A delegation from the Parliament of Victoria, Australia visited the Manawatu campus this week to learn how Massey helps prepare young people for a career in agriculture.

The members of the Education and Training Committee visited the No.4 dairy farm and were also given presentations by a number of University academics and students.

Speakers included Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey, College of Sciences head Professor Robert Anderson, Assistant Vice-Chancellor Stuart Morriss, Agri-food strategy manager Mark Jeffries and Director of the Centre for Excellence in Farm Business Management Professor Nicola Shadbolt. They also met with a selection of agriculture students who spoke of their studies and future career plans.

Committee chair and Victorian Member of Parliament David Southwick said New Zealand was chosen because of the great reputation it has for training young people in agriculture.

“We have a huge issue back home with growing demand in the industry,” he says. “In New Zealand, the biggest thing I have seen so far is the collaboration between industry, education and government to really promote the success and opportunities in careers. Agriculture in New Zealand is like our mining industry in Australia; we have people jumping to pursue careers in mining, yet our agriculture is booming and people are not pursuing careers in it.”

One thing he has taken away from the trip is the incentives given to students. “We’ve heard today that Massey does really good things in supporting young people with industry awards, which we don’t have to the same extent in Australia.”

College of Sciences head Professor Robert Anderson says Massey University has a reputation for leadership in the agricultural sectors, especially in the agri-food context, and this is well known across the Tasman. “Given that it’s a matter of concern that there is decreased participation in agriculture in Australia, it makes sense for them to find out more about the sustained leadership that institutions such as Massey displays,” he says.

Professor James Chapman

Duncan Sarkies

Laurence Fearnley

Rhian Gallagher

Massey University’s annual Writers Read series starts in Wellington next week with a reading by playwright, screenwriter and fiction author Duncan Sarkies.

Mr Sarkies is best known as the co-writer (with his brother Robert Sarkies) of the hugely successful 1999 film Scarfies. He has won several theatre and playwright awards and his collection of bleak and funny short stories stray thoughts and nose bleeds won the Hubert Church New Zealand Society of Authors Best First Book of Fiction Award. He has been a scriptwriter for Flight of the Conchords, and published his first novel, Two Little Boys, in 2008. The film of Two Little Boys (starring local hero Brett McKenzie) will be released this year.

Mr Sarkies will read excerpts from his new novel, The Demolition of the Century, and talk about how he wrote it. He will also share new writing from the forthcoming Two Little Boys movie, a soon-to-be republished set of short stories, and other works in progress. Mr Sarkies will be delivering his reading in conversation with Mark Amery on Thursday May 24 at 6pm, at the Massey campus off Wallace Street.

The other writers scheduled to read in Wellington are poet Rhian Gallagher and novelist Laurence Fearnley. For full details, see the programme below.

Writers Read is an annual series of readings by some of New Zealand’s foremost authors, with events in all three Massey cities: Wellington, Auckland and Palmerston North. The series started as a partnership with the Palmerston North City Library seven years ago, and spread to the capital two years later. Creative writing lecturer Dr Ingrid Horrocks, who coordinates the series, says this year the programme has broadened to include not only writing for screen and theatre but also non-fiction. Massey University Writer-in-Residence poet Johanna Aitchison was first up in the Palmerston North series on April 27, while best-selling American author Dr Jeffrey Masson read some of his work at Massey’s Albany campus on May 2.

Writers Read has featured many of New Zealand’s top literary figures over the years including Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Farrell and Vincent O’Sullivan. It now has a firm place in the literary calendar.

Wellington Writers Read programme:
Wellington events are on Thursdays at 6pm, in the Theatre Laboratory (5D14) Wallace Street, Entrance A:

May 24:        Duncan Sarkies
July 26:        Rhian Gallagher
September 13:    Laurence Fearnley

Readings take about one hour. Everyone is welcome to stay for refreshments afterwards.

Full programme

Professor James Chapman is the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Massey University's College of Education.

Watch the YouTube video.

Professor Olaf Diegel

Massey University mechatronics professor Olaf Diegel made his dream come true when he created a series of colourful 3D-printed electric guitars with latticed bodies adorned with spiders and butterflies.  

And when he posted images of the prototypes, explaining their origins before launching an online business, musicians and design buffs worldwide were dazzled by the aesthetics and a deluge of inquiries ensued.

Now, punters can hear the decorative, brightly coloured instruments, with a demo by Massey jazz guitar tutor and freelance rock guitarist Neil Watson, of the New Zealand School of Music. Mr Watson is based at the University’s Albany campus where Professor Diegel is a lecturer and researcher.  

The clip is evidence that the custom-made instrument, which began as an experimental project, is not just a pretty gimmick. Not only does it sound as good as its mainstream counterparts, it symbolises a revolutionary era in manufacturing, says Professor Diegel.

Also known as additive manufacturing, 3D printing is the process of making three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file using a printer that deposits layers of plastic or metal powder, with each layer fused by a precision laser beam.

The process, used for high-end customised products or medical parts such as artificial hips, hearing aids and dental fittings, as well as niche designer items, is the future for manufacturing specific types of goods, says Professor Diegel, who is based at the School of Engineering and Advanced Technology.

“The whole purpose is customisation and trying to avoid waste,” he says. “It’s the next big thing in manufacturing, because you can create to order and modify the design to suit specific individual requirements, whether it’s for a new set of teeth, a door handle or a piece of jewellery.”

And in a decade or so, he predicts many households will have 3D printers for replacing or updating personal and household items, reducing the need for mass production that can lead to stockpiles, over-supply and, ultimately, waste. “It’s the next industrial revolution and it’s going to completely change the way we do things,” says Professor Diegel.

“New Zealand, a country largely made up of small companies making high-value products, can benefit enormously from these technologies, as they will be able to go to market with products without the current prohibitive tooling costs that often prevent them from getting their ideas off the ground”.

So far he has printed several small guitar bodies – such as the shocking pink ‘rock chick’ model – in New Zealand, and two larger ones in the United States because of the size of the machine needed. His school has several desktop 3D printers, which students use for small-scale engineering prototype projects, and he hopes a larger-scale machine will be on campus later this year.

Once the guitar bodies are printed they are manually fitted with inner wooden cores, which can be made of different types of wood, such as mahogany or maple, to adjust the guitar’s tone. The necks are made of maple or mahogany, with traditional tuning keys and strings added. The guitars will be sold via his ODD online site (www.odd.org.nz), and can be adapted to suit design tastes, colour and quirks of the buyer.

“If someone wants geckos, or flowers, or parts that can move, it will eventually all be possible through the online design software we are working on.”

But even if the guitars are a smash hit, he doubts even the most hard-core rocker will want to smash one as a performance antic.

Caption: Professor Olaf Diegel with one of his 3D printed guitars.

Virginia Goldblatt, Professor Laurence Boulle, and Christine Grice, New Zealand Law Society executive director at a Wellington reception after the first masterclass.

A series of mediation masterclasses by Professor Laurence Boulle of Bond University were so popular that discussions are already underway to invite the academic back to New Zealand.

Professor Boulle, an expert mediator and teacher with an international reputation, was brought to New Zealand by Massey University and the New Zealand Law Society to run two masterclasses for the Society’s Continuing Legal Education Programme.

The masterclasses represented the next phase of a long-standing partnership between the two organisations to offer mediation training for lawyers. This included the jointly-offered workshops Undertaking Mediation, and Mediation for Family Lawyers.

Professor Boulle is well known in New Zealand mediation circles and recently returned to Australia after two years as the Issy Wolfson Professor of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he was also the director of the Mandela Institute.  

He recently co-authored Mediation Skills and Techniques, and his masterclasses involved teaching and reflecting on some of the key skills outlined in his book. This included the handling of emotion, dealing with impasse, addressing power imbalances, and the vital skill of reframing.

Professor Boulle also drew on other professional disciplines to show how they can enhance the skills of the mediator and extend the horizons of the reflective practitioner.

Participants in the two masterclasses included some of New Zealand’s most senior lawyer mediators, and the most experienced practitioners in the room provided a valuable resource and created a stimulating workshop environment. Learning and teaching went hand in hand, as did theory and application.

Virginia Goldblatt, the director Massey University’s Dispute Resolution Centre, was instrumental in organising Professor Boulle’s visit. She was also one of Professor Boulle’s co-authors (with Wellington barrister Phillip Green) of the companion book on mediation in New Zealand, Mediation: Principles. Process and Practice.

Ms Goldblatt described Professor Boulle’s visit as making an important contribution to the international profile of the profession of mediation.

“Professor Boulle’s visit reinforces the strong commitment of both the Law Society and Massey University to the development and delivery of mediation education for lawyers, and its role in dispute resolution in New Zealand,” she said.

Dr Pushpa Wood, the new director of the New Zealand Centre for Personal Financial Education.

Dr Mary Paul; and cover of the book.

Professor David Raubenheimer examines the gut contents of a New Zealand snapper for a nutrition study which could assist with conservation management of the species.

The Nature of Nutrition

Why we eat what we eat is a vastly complex subject. It’s something Massey University nutritional ecologist Professor David Raubenheimer has spent many years researching, doing nutritional analyses of the feeding habits of everything from snapper and snow leopards to gannets, gorillas and humans.

The epic story of what determines dietary behaviour is told in a new book he co-authored with Australian professor Stephen Simpson, titled The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity (Princeton University Press).

The book is the first to explore nutrition’s enormously complex role on biology, both at the level of individual organisms and in relation to their broader ecological interactions.

In it the authors explain a theoretical approach they devised in order to analyse nutrition across a vast array of species and environments. Called the Geometric Framework, the innovative tool is used in measuring, defining and understanding the links between nutrition and the biology of animals, including humans. This includes physiological mechanisms that drive the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences for health, immune responses and lifespan.

The authors show how the Geometric Framework can be used to study and tackle a wide range of issues, from how to optimise the diets of livestock or endangered species to addressing the causes of human obesity and metabolic disease.

Professor Raubenheimer, featured in the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post and Manawatu Standard this week as part of the University’s latest campaign highlighting its expertise in environmental science and marine research, is based at the Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany. He will be speaking at the Albany campus Open Day this Saturday.

Professor Steve La Grow

Dr Andrew Murphy, senior lecturer in marketing at Massey University, and sometimes fair trade coffee consumer.

While fair trade coffee results in more money in the pockets of coffee growers in developing countries, it can also bring better returns for cafés here in New Zealand.

Researchers at Massey University have found that customers of cafés that promote fair trade coffee in-store have higher satisfaction levels and are willing to pay more for their daily brew.

Dr Andrew Murphy, a marketing senior lecturer at Massey University’s Albany campus, says fair trade coffee is becoming a routine purchase for an increasing number of New Zealanders, both in cafés and in supermarkets.

“There are a greater number of cafés offering fair trade coffee, but it is still a premium product, not a mainstream one. If you talk to baristas, fair trade coffee does tend to be better quality, so it is one way for cafés to differentiate themselves if they want to attract a particular type of customer,” he says.

Research done by Dr Murphy and one of his students, Ben Jenner-Leuthart, showed that customers were generally supportive of fair trade principles and were willing to pay more for fair trade coffee, although not always as much as cafés tended to charge.

The pair also found that survey respondents were not always aware that their usual café sold fair trade coffee, or believed their café served fair trade when it actually did not, so more effective promotion had the potential to add value in both coffee sales and overall satisfaction.

Dr Murphy says that fair trade can be a useful marketing tool for cafés wishing to differentiate themselves, but to get the best results they must promote the product in-store.

“The imagery used around the café can connect the consumer with producers on the other side of the world – it gives them a picture of that farmer, along with the message that you can make a difference with your choice of coffee,” he says.

“Having baristas on message, so they can upgrade people to a fair trade coffee and be knowledgable about what that means, is also very important. When a customer asks, ‘Where does this come from?’, or ‘What difference does it really make?’, baristas can give a meaningful response that demonstrates the café’s commitment.”

The research also tested whether consumers would be more discriminating in their purchases if they were given more information about fair trade and its socially responsible activities. A focus group was asked to fill out the same survey before and after viewing Black Gold, a documentary about the inequities of the international coffee trade, to see if their attitudes changed.

“After watching Black Gold, the group seemed quite shocked by what they saw, and did genuinely seem to change their perceptions – and these were people who, by agreeing to participate, probably already had an above average interest in fair trade issues,” Dr Murphy says. “The group were certainly willing to pay a lot more for their coffee afterwards, and they also said taste became less important to them.”

While fair trade coffee can bring value to cafés that wish to differentiate themselves at the premium end of the market, the challenge for fair trade organisations is to grow the market while staying true to the values and principles of the movement.

“It is a bit like organics – as it becomes more mainstream, you get mainstream suppliers who want to come in and be a part of it. While this might lower price and thus attract a larger customer base, the danger is that you get someone like Nestlé or McDonald’s heavily promoting fair trade coffee, which might actually devalue the brand in the eyes of committed customers,” Dr Murphy says.

Dr Murphy and honours student Mr Jenner-Leuthart surveyed 150 customers from six Auckland cafés (three of which sold fair trade coffee), and outlined their results in a paper titled “Fairly sold? Adding value with fair trade coffee in cafés”, recently published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

Key findings included:

• Women rated having fair trade coffee present in a café as much more important than men.
• Customers who thought their café sold fair trade coffee were more satisfied than those who were unsure or believed it did not.
• On average, customers were prepared to pay 44 cents more for a cup of fair trade brew.
• A focus group were willing to pay an extra 50 cents for a cup of fair trade coffee after watching the documentary Black Gold; they were also willing to pay an extra 35 cents for a cup of non-fair trade coffee.
• The focus group also slightly reduced the importance it put on coffee taste after watching Black Gold, and dramatically increased the importance it put on a café offering fair trade coffee.
• Customers didn’t always know if their café served fair trade coffee.

International indigenous scholars, Dr Tina Ngaroimata Fraser and Chuck Fraser, meet with Maori Studies Masters and PhD students. L-R: Chrales Fraser, Hōhepa Tamehana, Niwa Short with mokopuna Ariaana Te Hau, Agnes McFarland, Tina Ngāroimata Fraser, Sharna Te Hau and Professor Taiarahia Black.