Hiringa te Mahara Website
Role
Front-end coder and UX Designer
Collaborators
Laurie Lloyd-Jones and Kimiora Whaanga
Client
Hiringa te mahara
Industry
Research
Year
2026
Front-end coded a HTML website for a collective of Māori academics, creatives and experts working with their community to develop Māori Ai solutions
Problem :
Hiringa te Mahara is a newly established collective of creators working alongside their communities to explore how AI can uplift and strengthen Indigenous knowledge systems. They sought a digital platform that could articulate their kaupapa, celebrate their members, and connect with students and wider communities.
A key priority was ensuring the platform could evolve over time — with future functionality to support secure member logins and protected knowledge storage. Importantly, the website needed to be hosted on their own server to safeguard Māori data sovereignty and ensure cultural and technical protection within Aotearoa.
Solution :
To address this, we designed a fully customised responsive website that's hosted and protected in Aotearoa. This soft release showcases services, member bios and most importantly interviews they have done at their recent AGM - providing a great way to showcase who they are and what they're passionate about.
My main role was to define the sitemap, wireframe the key pages and front-end code the website with an HTML template. The website celebrates the branding I also helped design in another project.
Challenge :
The main challenge was probably learning to front-end code on the fly. I'm grateful to have picked up a new skill however there was a lot of failures and successes I learnt first hand when developing this website. I'm grateful for the immense support for the developers in the team who helped and guided me throughout this project to develop something we can all be proud of.
Summary :
I'm very thankful to Hiringa te mahara for giving me the chance to bring their vision to life. Their trust and proactiveness to participate was a joy to experience. This is just one platform of many to come from this kaupapa. I couldn't have done this project without my design & development partners Laurie and Kimiora.
