In our interior environments, the carpet is a woven ground, tenuously connecting us to whenua below, with which we are in danger of losing a meaningful relationship. Yet, if wellbeing is predicated on the need for integrated natural, social and cultural environments, how can the carpet be designed to acknowledge woven ground as rich, diverse and sustaining?
Wellbeing is to-be-well, especially together: emphasizing interconnection among people as well as between them and this fragile planet, which requires equitable access to quality surroundings. This includes the built environment, which should welcome, host and enable the public through design sensitivity that interweaves people, place and material. As a form, the carpet is an inherently woven ground — literally and metaphorically — drawing spatial threads together and holding space through its sensory layered surface.
In Te Reo Māori, as in English, ‘RARANGA/weaving’ is both an action and an artefact… a doing and the thing done. Weaving is an important aspect of Pacific cultural life and whenua itself could be seen as an interweave of elements — earth, plants, animals insects and humans. Unlike European humanism, an indigenous worldview doesn’t separate human and non-human, nature and culture.
As an act of weaving, Raranga is seen by many as an active tool, helping us make sense of the material world, which is both natural and constructed. It could be thought of as a sensory, sensible and sensational tool… primarily appealing to touch as a sensation: a pleasurable mode of feeling that helps us know and be in the world. Drawing on the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, this relates to ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a politics of aesthetics where a well-designed sensory world should be available to all.
RARANGA proposes a fluid interweaving abstract pattern, in which the carpet pile varies in length. This variation is not only seen by the eye, but is also sensed by the bare foot, tactile hand and even through clothing or the soles of our socks. It invites us to remove our shoes and engage bodily with touch as well as through the haptic eye. The ground is not a smooth frictionless surface but a natural landscape of valleys and ridges as well as a constructed urbanscape of networks and roadways. This interweaving of culture and nature emphasises our lived world as neither one thing nor another. Pops of colour remind us that the woven ground is not homogenous but accented and interesting.
RARANGA invites us to weave with our eyes and with our bodies. It encourages children to trace the territory with their toys and stimulates our imaginations to get lost in a spatial labyrinth.
Emphasising collectivity, RARANGA evokes the natural through texture, pattern and colour, accentuates the social by interweaving the tactile ground with people and things, and draws on the cultural to emphasise that the world itself is a co-constructed and diverse interweave.
