n October 1883, just as New Zealanders began the annual ritual of buying seasonal tokens of esteem to post overseas, Dunedin’s Evening Star, quoting local photographers the Burton Brothers, posed a question that had exercised immigrants for some years. “Does it not seem folly,” the paper asked “to send back to the Old Country Christmas cards which were manufactured there and exported hither?”1 This was a rhetorical question and the Evening Star went on to respond that “a few years since we should have replied ‘No’; but in view of the experiences of the last two years we say most decidedly, ‘Yes, it is folly.’” The newspaper, clearly, saw the period of 1881 and 1882 as pivotal in the establishment of a small but important industry, the New Zealand Christmas card business.2 My paper examines why these years are significant and what lies behind the debate, identifying a number of early cards and documenting the accompanying developments, primarily via the lens of newspaper advertising. The 1880s Christmas card may not have been an industry on the scale of lamb, but what it lacked in bulk it made up for in symbolism, providing a discrete window into the web of entangled emotional, commercial and design imperatives that attended the way immigrants imagined and constructed this important cultural celebration.

This project explores how a design-led approach can be used to improve health seekers' wayfinding experiences within a public hospital. It questions how communication design might support and empower wayfinding health seekers. Whilst addressing physical wellness, hospitals often overlook the high levels of stress, anxiety and uncertainty that come with this particular environment. Currently within healthcare, there is an institutional shift toward providing patientcentred care, so that the patient's voice can be heard in the process of designing services and solutions. The vulnerabilities of health seekers within healthcare contexts mean that there is a greater need for meaningful communication. A Children's Outpatient Department was used as an environment to explore the challenges that people face when negotiating complex environments when the attention is focused on their own, or their family's healthcare journeys. By constraining the research initially to a specific location, full-scale in-situ prototypes were able to be installed to enhance engagement with design research and help generate deeper insights around wayfinding contexts. Thus a holistic approach to outpatient wayfinding was able to be developed, that emphasised the broader healthcare experience of the individual, and demonstrated how a design solution may support and guide this journey. Rather than investigating the environment in isolation, there was a consideration of multiple channels of wayfinding communication. These channels are crucial to prepare and support wayfinding at different stages within a journey. Wayfinding solutions should aim to empower health seekers by communicating information in ways that enable confidence and informed decision-making. The designed wayfinding solutions demonstrate the importance of cohesive and staggered information that reflects the health-seeking journey. Throughout the development and testing of these solutions, there was an S2551 EDEN JAYNE SHORT, STEPHEN REAY, PETER GILDERDALE emergent need to emphasis the supporter role (parents and caregivers) when health seeking in a children's outpatient environment due to the complexity of wayfinding tasks. Stakeholder relationships were critically important in undertaking this design-led research and testing the feasibility of designed solutions. Through probes, prototyping and project collaboration, the designs produced were able to respond to real problems, to test assumptions and validate the need for change in ongoing wayfinding projects within hospital environments.

For both Edwardian migrants and First World War soldiers, communicating home involved a choice as to the appropriate emotional regimes to use. Should they display stoic reserve, or communicate sentimental feeling? Research on correspondence has normally focused on letters, but this paper examines how emotion was dealt with through the multimodal medium of the greetings postcard. It argues that whilst handwritten texts on postcards remained primarily stoic, the pre-packaged visual vocabulary on greetings postcards allowed users to send strongly emotional arguments for the maintenance of their relationships without ever having to put these into their own words. Postcards, it seems, gave the Edwardians the option of being both stoic and sentimental.

No abstract

No abstract