Isaac Jang
Kuʻikahi: Revitalizing
the Hawaiian Language
Communicating the need for indigenous language education through information design and information architecture
Organization
The University of Hawaii Community Design Center (UHCDC) is a design collective housed within the School of Architecture in the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. The UHCDC works on public interest design projects for nonprofit, government, and internal university clients.
Client
The Kuʻikahi Consortium is a coalition of academic and nonprofit organizations that, collectively, comprise the Hawaiian language revitalization movement.
Awards & Dissemination
This work is part of the larger ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Campus project, which was awarded and recognized at the following:
2024 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award
2023 Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards
2023 AIA Honolulu Award of Excellence - Unbuilt
112th ACSA Annual Meeting: Disrupters on the Edge, “Society+Community: Practices of Decolonization,” Session Presentation, moderated by David T. Fortin, Vancouver, Canada, March 15, 2024.
AIA International Virtual Meeting, December 4, 2023.
Time: June–August 2022
Role: Summer Design Associate
Context: University of Hawaiʻi
Community Design Center
Design Skills and Methods Used:
Secondary research, writing, information design, visual communication, workshop facilitation, client management
Tools Used: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop
How does design help revive
an endangered language?
Concept of the Pūnana Leo o Hilo structure. Credit: UHCDC team
Design Problem
From the 19th to the mid–20th century, the Hawaiian culture and language entered into a period of severe decline. Since the 1970's, critical efforts by a handful of organizations have resulted in a significant revival of Hawaiian language and culture. However, the percentage of native speakers in Hawaii remains under 0.1% of the statewide population, and the language is still officially classified as endangered.
The Kuʻikahi Consortium, a newly formed coalition of existing Hawaiian language organizations, sought to implement their vision of an immersive language eduction campus. Team members from the UHCDC developed a number of concepts for the proposed buildings on the campus, including a preschool, a research and curriculum development facility, and a graduate studies & outreach center.
With a proposal for the built environment in hand, the Kuʻikahi faced a problem: funding still needed to be approved by the state legislature, in addition to securing the approval of other entities.
How could they effectively communicate their need for new facilities to the state government? Additionally, how would they communicate the merits of the proposed campus and its numerous design details? The coalition would have to effectively convey that their planned programs exceeded the capabilities of their existing inadequate infrastructure, and that their proposed campus was part of a larger model of language revitalization on which which other language movements could base their own efforts.
Communicating organizational needs through strategic visuals
Scale model of the Pūnana Leo o Hilo structure. Image credit: Tom Takata
Visualizing history to advocate for funding
Many of the coalition's organizations had gone decades without a purpose-built structure to support their work—upwards of 40 years, in some instances. I developed this timeline to emphasize this prolonged lack of dedicated infrastructure as well as the proposed building phases.
v1
v2
v3
Final
The diagram began as a simple linear timeline, which suggests a purely sequential narrative. By seeking critique from graphic artists and cultural/history experts on the team, I developed the diagram to further emphasize the concurrent development of different phases, the evolving relationship between organizations and buildings, and to further distinguish existing vs. planned work.
A month later, the clients' needs evolved to represent the timeline in a more information-dense format on their website, as a supporting element for structure renderings. I adapted an early sketch of the timeline to fit this condensed, yet easily scanable linear format.
Prototyping diagrams
How do you visually represent an idea like "language is closely linked to culture, reaching beyond academics"? We started by prototyping visual forms on a whiteboard.
Communicating
complex ideas
Once basic visual forms were decided on, they were refined and adapted to the client's visual language, and matched with carefully considered wording that conveyed the values of the coalition.
Navigating the Client Relationship
Rendering of the proposed campus. Credit: UHCDC staff
Client meeting with more than a dozen leaders in the Hawaiian language revitalization movement (that's me by the corner). The session took place in a language classroom, naturally.
Working with multiple stakeholders with diverging goals
How do you interact with a client that is not just one organization, but five? During our sole in-person meeting with the leaders of the coalition in Hilo HI, the session shifted from a designer-led presentation to an inter-client debate on their internal priorities and values. Flexibility and knowing when to jump in versus keeping quiet were key to maintaining a productive session.
Clarifying relationships and value exchange
Since the client group was composed of 6 separate yet related organizations, it was important to clarify what each value each group derived from its relationship with another group. I refined and re-developed a set of of value web diagrams as a worksheet for the organizations to clarify the nature of their own relationships.
Supporting internal understanding
A framework poster had been previously developed for the client to use in clarifying their organizational structure and programming. I created a step-by-step guide to support the client's understanding and use of this complex framework, which I walked through with the client group during our in-person meeting.
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As the client's digital strategy evolved, I worked in tandem with an animator to create a video guide of the development framework.
Impact
Presenting the holistic concept to nonprofit leaders. Image credit: Tom Tanaka
Impact
The strategic communication design work shown here was one of several components of the larger ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Campus project, which continued throughout 2023 and 2024.
Following a presentation and meeting with the leaders of the nonprofit consortium and government bodies, funding for the next phase of the project was approved: a set of temporary classroom structures located on current nonprofit property, to function as a proof-of-concept. This is the first time that teaching models, process, and programming have been integrated into the physical site of the existing campus.
UHCDC is now in the process of developing a full scale architectural prototype of the overall concept.
Attributions
Principal Investigators
& Lead Designers
Karla Sierralta, AIA
Brian Strawn, AIA
UHCDC Project Staff
(site renderings, scale models, graphics)
John Colburn IX, Glenn Grande, Jason Hashimoto, Charles Palanza, Griffin Ward, Hunter Wells, Tre Zamora
UHCDC Student Team
Keola Annino, Micah Axalan, Airon Castaneda, Christina Holcom, Keliʻi Kapali, Vivianne Nguyen, Bryson Tabaniag, Coby Shimabukuro Sanchez
Design Research Advisor
HyunJoo Lee