Tuwhera Research Repository

The Tuwhera Research Repository provides sustainable open access and archiving to a broad range of AUT produced research - theses, research outputs and datasets.

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Recent Submissions

Access status: Restricted ,
Exploring Chinese Senior Travellers’ Motivations and Experiences in Culturally Immersive Wellness Tourism in New Zealand
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Liu, Keming; Liu, Claire
This study explores the motivations, expectations, and experiences of Chinese senior travellers engaging in culturally immersive wellness tourism in New Zealand. Addressing the limited research at the intersection of senior, wellness, and cultural tourism, it adopts an interpretivist qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Mandarin with ten Chinese travellers aged 55 and above who had visited New Zealand, and the data were examined through thematic analysis. The findings show that family connections, nature-based relaxation, safety, curiosity about local lifestyles, and imagined possibilities for later life were key travel motivations. Participants understood wellness primarily through clean air, natural scenery, emotional relaxation, safe food, comfortable accommodation, and a slower pace, rather than through formal wellness products. Cultural immersion was experienced mainly through everyday encounters with local homes, supermarkets, small towns, food, neighbourhoods, and residents. Although New Zealand was generally perceived as safe, peaceful, and senior-friendly, language difficulties, transport and driving concerns, food preferences, physical limitations, cultural unfamiliarity, and cost constrained participants’ independence and depth of engagement. The study broadens wellness tourism beyond commercial services and highlights the culturally situated, family-mediated nature of senior travel. It recommends more accessible transport, Mandarin-language support, flexible itineraries, familiar food options, and culturally sensitive experiences for Chinese senior visitors.
Access status: Open Access ,
Too Much of a Good Thing? The Curvilinear Effects of Job Clarity on Career Satisfaction and Creativity Among Hospitality Employees
(Elsevier BV, 2027-02-01) Zhu, Dan; Kim, Seontaik ; Meng, Qian; Bui, Anh Minh (Jessica); Kim, Peter B
This study challenges the assumption that greater job clarity always benefits service employees. Drawing on self-determination theory and the Too-Much-of-a-Good-Thing framework, we test a moderated curvilinear mediation model linking job clarity, career satisfaction, and creativity, with career calling as a boundary condition. Using three-wave, multi-source data from 164 supervisor–employee dyads in Chinese hotels, results reveal inverted U-shaped relationships between job clarity and both career satisfaction and supervisor-rated creativity. Career satisfaction mediates this curvilinear effect. Moreover, career calling amplifies the curvature—employees high in calling gain greater motivational and creative benefits as clarity increases but experience sharper losses at very high clarity levels. These findings position job clarity as a dynamic and context-dependent resource, offering theoretical and managerial insights for fostering creativity and well-being among hospitality employees.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Scent of Heaven
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Biyoughardalan, Leva; Lever, Ziggy; Amundsen, Fiona
This research investigates the conditions that enable imagination. Rather than understanding imagination as an individual capacity, my research argues that imagination depends on the conditions of survival. To imagine requires time, safety, nourishment, rest, and the ability to live beyond crisis. Working through ceramics, poetry, social practice, and the sofreh as both subject and methodology, this research asks how art can create these conditions for imagination to thrive. Through works including damagh, canopy, Sobahneh, I examine gathering, hospitality, and shared ritual as artistic practices that build relationships rather than simply producing objects. These works draw on my lived experience as an artist in diaspora, where cultural knowledge is carried through acts of care performed around the sofreh. This research proposes care as a form of living infrastructure. Rather than treating care as an outcome of art, I argue that care is the condition that makes art, culture, and collective life possible. The sofreh becomes both a methodology and a site through which nourishment, hospitality, and collective responsibility are practised, demonstrating how everyday acts of care can become forms of cultural survival and political resistance
Access status: Open Access ,
Tracing Fire: Spaces of Ritual and Rhythm
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Winchcombe, Casey; Douglas, Carl; Ruckes, Amber
This research explores the role of ritual in an object-based spatial design practice by engaging with memory, bodily rhythms, lunar cycles, and the utilisation of fire as a traditional method of making. The project sees these systems as vital configurations to guide both the physical making and modes of thinking. Fire becomes the catalyst for transforming material into ceremonial tools essential in performing a two-part ritual: a burning ritual at moonrise and a drawing ritual at sunrise. Both rituals are interdependent, with objects and residues carried from one ceremony to the next, emphasising cycles of material and spiritual transformation. Emerging from observing my mother’s daily rituals of commemorating lost loved ones at a shrine she built herself, this work extends ritual into a designed spatial environment. The project comes together in a series of material artefacts and spatial interventions that hold the residues of these cyclical processes and reflect on the relationship between rhythms and transformative making. It frames ritual as a cultural and spiritual practice, but also as a way of working that shapes how material, time, and body relate to one another. From there, the research explores how embodied practice might open alternative approaches to spatial design that attend to spiritual connectedness, bodily rhythms, and material change.
Access status: Open Access ,
Alert360: A Low-Cost, Interpretable Browser-Based Motion Awareness for Multi-Camera Monitoring
(MDPI AG, 2026-10-12) Nguyen, Minh; Nguyen, Trung; Hu, Xinyu; Xiao, Bingjie
This paper presents Alert360, a low-cost and intrinsically interpretable browser-based multi-camera motion awareness system for local monitoring in security, retail, education, laboratory, and workplace settings, designed to run on commodity cameras and consumer-grade browser-capable computers without dedicated GPUs. Existing video analytics platforms are often cloud-dependent, costly, or designed for complex surveillance tasks that exceed the needs of small sites. Alert360 addresses a narrower but practically important problem: lightweight operational motion awareness using commodity cameras and modern web browsers. Alert360 provides lightweight, rule-based, and privacy-conscious motion awareness using commodity cameras and modern web browsers. The system performs camera capture, frame processing, motion estimation, alerting, and event review entirely on the client side. Its motion pipeline includes frame down-scaling, grayscale conversion, smoothing, adaptive background differencing, temporal differencing, mask refinement, and blob-based activity estimation. The interface supports concurrent camera streams, configurable frame rates, adjustable sensitivity, movement focus, off-screen guidance, optional acoustic alerts, and local snapshot retention. A controlled benchmark across seven multi-camera scenarios showed a mean processing time of 10.62 ms per frame, zero late frames, and a maximum estimated processing duty cycle of 24.43%. An illustrative office-area deployment using a 1080p 360-degree webcam showed that all thirty scripted human-movement scenarios activated the expected motion-triggered recording workflow. These results demonstrate that motion awareness can be delivered through browser-native local processing on consumer-grade computers under the evaluated multi-camera configurations.