1. Why did you move to New Zealand six years ago?
Among other reasons, I've always been fascinated with Māori culture and how they've been able to find their place in this new world without losing track of their old. My dream is for my people to learn from them.
2. Where are you from?
I grew up in remote north-east India, near Myanmar. My great grandfather's generation was the last of the head hunters, literally take-your-head-and-stick-it-on-a-pole head hunters. The funny thing was, by the time my granddad died I'd showed him the internet. I'm from the Mizo nation of tribes. We fought a 20-year war of independence against India. We don't look or sound Indian. We're more eastern. Our language is tonal, like Chinese. While I was too young to see the worst of the occupation, it was horrible. The army burnt the villages so you had to walk three hours to your fields but if you got caught walking home after dark you'd be shot. I've had friends killed by the rebels and friends killed by the army.
3. Did you ever fear for your own safety?
I remember being 13 and going to the shops to buy sweets. I had long hair, I was really into heavy metal like Sepultura and Judas Priest, and this army guy on a street corner put a gun to my head and demanded, 'Who are you? Where are you going?' It was just the knowledge he could have shot me without any consequence. That's one of the things I really love about New Zealand - no guns.
4. Were your family involved?
I had relatives on both sides. Granddad fought for the British Army in WWII. He refused to talk about it. He'd just say, "There's nothing glorious in war". He brought us up with a deep respect for life. One of his rules was that when you turned 13 if you wanted to eat a chicken, you had to kill a chicken.
5. Are you religious?
My parents are Christian Missionaries. I went through a stage of rejecting Christianity completely but as I grow older I can see some real beauty in the myths and metaphors of it.
6. Why did you become a librarian?
I'd always helped people access technology in the Telecom and IT industries but when I moved to Aotearoa I couldn't get work in that field. I spent a lot of time at the library, reading comics and learning about Māori culture and eventually a friend offered me a casual job.
7. How would you describe librarians?
These days tattoos and piercings are more common among librarians than glasses and buns. Everyone's in a band or acting or illustrating comic books. Librarians have this crazy fierceness to them. I remember being surprised by how openly they talk about politics. They're passionate about free speech. Auckland Libraries took equal grief from both the Left and the Right for two completely different books, one called Into the River and one advocating corporal punishment for children. They might not agree with what's in it but they're not going to take it off the shelf.
8. What does your 'digital outreach' job involve?
I've helped set up the first 'maker spaces' in Auckland Libraries. A maker space is kind of like a shed where you can build stuff. They work on the theory that we learn by doing and operate in the boundary between the 'real' and the virtual. So creative software like 3D animation, recording music, 3D printers and robotics. To start the first maker space at Auckland Central Library we looked at examples in Australia and America which cost up to a hundred thousand dollars to set up. We were given $10,000. The best part of this story is we did it for $6,000.
9. But isn't that kind of technology really expensive?
3D printers cost about $3,700 to buy and are really cheap to run on a biodegradable material called PLA polylactic acid made from corn starch and milk by-products. For instance an iPhone case takes an hour to print and costs a dollar. We have robotics at Otahuhu and Whau. Clendon and Panmure focus on recording music. It doesn't look like much - just some microphones and a computer with software for making beats. We use Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) like Linux instead of Windows or Apple so people can take it home for free. I'm not sure if that was a brilliant idea yet. I'm finding people are reluctant to experiment. In consumer culture, technology has been a kind of received wisdom. Someone else made it and you obediently use it as instructed. Under no circumstances do you take a screwdriver to it. Maker spaces are exactly the opposite way of thinking. They take more of an art-like approach. There are no mistakes when you're writing a poem. It'll take time for us as a generation to get used to this idea. Kids are much more willing. Many will work in jobs that don't yet exist. How do we prepare them for that?
10. Did you have any outcomes you weren't expecting in setting up the maker spaces?
My dream when setting up the recording spaces was that the kids would record their songs, we'd put it on Youtube and have Panmure vs Clendon sing-offs. What actually happened was the kids were too whakamaa (shy) to share. They'd spend hours practicing and recording music and then just delete it. I was feeling really despondent when one of the librarians showed me a pile of tagged furniture waiting to be cleaned. She said, "This pile's been collecting for six months. Before the maker space, this was a one week pile." It was a different outcome to what I'd expected but it didn't matter because the kids had made up for my mistakes and reclaimed the space.
11. What mistakes?
I needed to grow it more from the ground up. I've actually started my own garden just to be able to understand this work better. When you think about making a thing, it's about getting it right. But when you think about growing a thing, there's less control and more understanding and respect for context. For example dealing with snails - you look for options and creative solutions.
12. You've just finished a Masters thesis. What was that about?
Connecting how people learn in maker spaces back to oral cultures like Maori. If you think about waiata and carving and ta moko, they're visual archives. The learning is in the listening and the doing. Working class European cultures also tend to be oral.. Giving someone a big book on how to operate a forklift is useless. The world right now is arguably moving from mass literacy to post-literacy. An example is texting - it's still written communication but the style and tone is oral. If we're going to help prepare people for a post literate world, we need to better understand how learning was done in pre-literate cultures.
• http://www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/EN/services/makerspaces/Pages/makerspaces.aspx
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