Tyrone Ohia

It’s a full-immersion Māori school system with its own curriculum. To start with, I went to kōhanga reo with my nan, next to our marae in Tauranga. Kōhanga reo are Māori kindergartens, so you speak Māori — it’s quite a different worldview. My partner, Mel is a schoolteacher, and she talks about all these school journal books that everyone who went to a mainstream school in New Zealand knows about, and I didn’t know any of them — I was reading about Māui, eels and octopus, and taniwha instead. You’re learning the language through understanding the universe of Rangi and Papa, so I had this view instilled in me. Those early days from kōhanga reo through to kura embedded a lot of Māori language and frameworks in me. When I went to a mainstream high school, things changed, and it opened me up to other things, like photography, painting, technical drawing and fine art.

I was very eager to get out of Whanganui. I’ve never been someone who’s into bits of paper, degrees, titles, and those sorts of things. I just wanted to get out there and start doing some stuff. My end-of-year project at uni got a New York Type Directors Club award, so I was quite lucky. I remember making my own website, and it had about 15 quite solid projects on there. I’d actually done some speaking, too, at a design conference in Melbourne called agIdeas. A group of us from uni went over, and it was a real booster for me because we got to meet people like Mark Gowing from Formist, who was talking, and all these other cats, like Richard Seymour from Seymour Powell; crazy product designers doing amazing stuff like conceptualising spaceships for Richard Branson. I then also got a feature on It’s Nice That once I put my website up, which helped.

I applied for, and got, a job at a place in Wellington called Scenario. We did a lot of government ministry work, annual reports and stuff, which was classic Wellington work for that time. We had this creative director, Richie Hartness, who’d recently come over from London and had worked on very big jobs over there, like the Commonwealth Games brand. They were really patient with me, as I would have still been pretty oblivious and a bit green, like any student who’s coming out of uni. I started noticing they were giving me more time to get jobs done and letting me make a call on things. That push-and-pull of me wanting to do a good job, and them giving me space to do it as well, was so good for me in those first three years.

I met a lot of people, including Duncan and Elena Forbes from the International Office — I really loved their work. There was Warren Olds, Duncan Munro, and those kinds of guys doing classic cultural publication stuff that all the students liked when they came out of uni; and I connected with Kris Sowersby as well, because he studied in Whanganui, too. So I had a bit of a circle going on with people who were interested in design. I was doing lots of stuff on the side, too — photography, street art, lots of paste-up posters in my spare time, and playing the drums. Sven Baker and Paul Johnson then reached out to me from Designworks, and I went there.

I’m getting much more intentional as I get older. In hindsight, even though I didn’t consciously make all of those decisions to get to the next step or to get someone’s attention, to get a job, or whatever, I always believed that something would come out of it if I just kept doing things and making things. Now our studio is very single-minded in what we’re here to do. I’m less interested in graphic design, to be honest, and more interested in being a vessel to progress Māori culture. That’s pretty much all it is.

Some Māori get into kapa haka to promote their culture, some put efforts into Treaty settlements, some into te reo, but for me graphic design is what I’m sort of weaponising for my culture essentially. And it’s a powerful visual platform for me to be able to promote Māori culture. It’s as black and white as that for me, and we’ll be doing that until the next generation basically takes my job. Success for me is when I’ve worked myself out of a job. There are all these other Māori out there who are exploring identity in Aotearoa, Māori identity, and doing a better job than we ever could.

I also don’t really look at graphic design that much. Most of my influences are music, art and architecture. It’s very rare that I see a graphic design studio doing something I haven’t seen before. It seems to be quite formulaic, repeating or making something relevant again that someone’s already done a few years ago. Most of the modelling for me has come from looking at African and Japanese architects and Indigenous fine artists and how they go about interpreting their world — Takashi Murakami is a good example from a Japanese point of view. I try to find people who have models that I can learn from.

For example, I love music movements like K‑pop — they’re wearing strange stuff, and the music videos are weird. They’re taking aspects of their culture and mixing them with new technology, and they’re smashing it. That’s what I’m magpie-ing for on a daily basis: asking, how are people doing that?

When I’m 50, I want to start a design school. I’m trying to just make enough noise now so that other designers will start doing it, too, and then I won’t have to do it anymore, and I can start a design school! From a te ao Māori point of view, you have to give back, and you have to nurture that next generation. Everything for me is channelling what I do through those Māori lenses and thinking intergenerationally. If I’m thinking intergenerationally from a design identity and design culture point of view, at some point, I’ve got to put a serious amount of time into encouraging and nurturing these kids who can go out and do things that I can’t even imagine.

The model that I’m talking about has come from a lot of Māori leaders who I look up to, like carvers and artists and weavers who have made pretty clear artistic pathways for themselves, and then they’ve got to a point where they can switch into education mode. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting and observing, and it feels like, for me at this stage, I’m doing this without having lived those years yet, but it feels like a way for me to keep myself interested, to keep things fresh, and then to contribute appropriately down the track.