Spirit of Te Araroa
WHO THEY ARE
BOOKLET & STORYTELLING PANELS
The Te Araroa Trail is a thru-hike, which spans the entire length of New Zealand (around 3000 kilometres). The trail is managed by the ‘Te Araroa Trust, who we worked closely with on this project.
WHAT WE DID
Our work with the Te Araroa Trail Trust centred around how walking the trail could evolve beyond a tourist experience, to one that includes custodianship and connection. This task was approached in a range of different ways, all of which aimed to encourage people to slow down, to learn a bit more about where they are and motivate them to undertake regenerative action.
Light to carry and containing information about beach and trail clean-up days, as well as valuable trail and community information, a booklet was developed to be handed out to walkers at the start of their journey. A social media calendar was also devised for a Facebook page, which would create a platform for real-time updates to these activities, and a place for walkers involved to share their own stories. Through asking walkers to join this community and record their activities on Facebook, they could encourage others to share their stories, while also enabling data to be collected to support future ‘Spirit of Te Araroa’ activities and investment.
Concertina Booklet
We were also tasked with creating a storytelling panel system. In a project like this a lot of different voices need to be heard, so the goal was to create a template that can adapt and collect the many different stories tied to a specific location. The process was less about making something purely visually pleasing and more about creating an underlying grid structure that could be used to create 50 cohesive looking panels along the length of our country.
We see Te Araroa Trail as this long journey, however, it’s actually made up of many gathering places. The voice of these signs should be able to reflect the specialness of each specific place - Sharing stories of people connecting with nature.
Storytelling Panels
