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What’s Been Happening in our MAKE│NZ Community
Last night we kicked off with our first Fireside chat of 2026 – weather be damned.
To discuss design for functionality vs design for manufacturing we had guest speakers from both the academic and practical side. Barro de Gast, a senior lecturer at the School of Product Design at the University of Canterbury, Jeff McDowell, Engineering Manager at Wyma Solutions, and Kent Stewart Research and Development Manager at Wyma Solutions, led our talk.
To open the floor, Barro shared with us a little about his background in design and that “Engineers like to say designers make things pretty, and that’s true, but it’s also more than that…we affect the end functionality.” Taking his perspective from the manufacturing and design world in Italy to New Zealand, he reflected on elements that may not be thought of in design, cultural differences that may not naturally occur. For instance, a snake-like character, that would be considered cute in New Zealand where there’s little risk in allowing children to see them as anything potentially dangerous, could be a problem in another country where snakes freely slither – where it could be dangerous to have children thinking they can go and pet any reptile that comes their way).
Jeff and Kent also gave us a brief introduction to the post-harvest giant that is Wyma Solutions. They attributed some of their success to their flexibility when it comes to design, having 90+ base products, which are often modified at customer request. In fact, the longer they’ve been operating, the more they’ve found customers wanting custom specifications to meet their customers’ needs, their crops, and their climates.
Getting into some back and forth with those in the audience, it was clear that responsive innovation, shaping your product to fit your customer’s needs, is certainly something that is alluring to customers. But it also comes with higher costs, and the need to have a good relationship with your customer. Letting them know you can customise their product from them, while also finding a happy middle point cost- and effort-wise is an important thing to establish. In fact, it can even trickle down, where users who have inherited your product from the previous customer may take advantage of smaller manufacturers who are happy to take on the small, new customisations needed.
The art of balancing design that benefits the manufacturer, benefits the customer, and even may benefit future manufacturers and customers is all something that comes down to juggling just what Barro said to begin with. Making things pretty and making them functional.
Other news of interest to manufacturers
•One of our members took note of an objection to the following statement in a recent edition of the ANZ Research daily newsletter New Zealand Morning Focus (Feb. 9): “Our FX forecasts expect the NZD and AUD continuing to rise this year with the economies relatively shielded from the prevailing global headlines.”
At first glance, that sounds counter-intuitive indeed. After all, isn’t New Zealand an ‘Export Economy’, and thus heavily exposed to what’s happening in global markets? As stated in a recent webinar, our Minister of Trade certainly seems to think so: “And so New Zealand is an export economy, but it has changed over the years. It is not just about butter or dairy anymore.” We’ll come back to the second part of the quote, but what about the ‘export economy’ claim?
Commonly, the degree to which a nation’s economy has an export focus is measured by how much of its GDP is generated from exports. Among OECD countries, New Zealand – at 23.7% (2023 World Bank Data) – sits close to the bottom of the table of OECD countries (#35 out of 38).
And Australia? – Just above New Zealand at 26.8%. So, on the surface, the ANZ FX experts appear to be right. But there is another aspect when it comes to the ‘trade vulnerability’ of a country – the degree of diversification in its portfolio of goods and services exported.
And while “It is not just about butter or dairy anymore.”, New Zealand’s exports are still dominated by primary products:
The bad news is that prices for these primary products fluctuate significantly and beyond the control of our exporters. Here is the data for dairy:
The good news is that these price movements are relatively cyclical and predictable in themselves.
The picture is very similar in Australia, albeit for another group of commodities:
And, again with price fluctuations typical for the commodity trade, here’s iron ore:
•Talking about future trend in currency exchange rates, the one rate that is probably most important to many New Zealand manufacturers is the NZD-AUD rate, which has shown major changes recently:
That matters, because Australia is the largest buyer of New Zealand-made mechanical machinery, nuclear reactors, and electrical equipment. In 2024, machinery exports to Australia exceeded $436 million. Across all categories, Australia receives approximately 12.6% of New Zealand’s total merchandise exports, but the shares are much higher for Machinery and Equipment (35 to 40%) and the wider category of Non-food Manufactured Goods (25 to 30%).
•The need to diversify their country’s exports has been well recognised in Australia, and, as indicated by Minister McLay, New Zealand. For Australia, and as reported several times in the past, that means a dedicated effort – supported by significant government funding – to grow their manufacturing sector.
However, government making a decision to grow the share of manufacturing in the economy, and acting (and investing) accordingly, doesn’t necessarily create change for the better.
Recent developments in the US show that even the strong determination shown by the US government to ‘bring manufacturing back home’ have yet to provide the desire results:
Whichever way you look at it …
… except for components for the IT industry:
•Markets are governed by the rules of supply and demand. The mechanisms behind those ‘rules’ can sometimes lead to interesting outcomes: The Suez Canal is ready to receive large container ships again after a ceasefire and a reduction in attacks in the Red Sea and Bab el‑Mandeb.
That must be good news for the world’s container shipping lines, or so one would have thought.
Not so, however.
As reported by Bloomberg, A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, one of the world’s biggest container lines, plans to cut jobs and focus on cost discipline this year as the container giant seeks to insulate its earnings against deteriorating freight rates with Red Sea routes reopening. Maersk’s guidance to shareholders predicts a gradual reopening of the Red Sea, which will free up global vessel capacity. The container line industry had benefited from the extra transport time needed to sail the long route south of Africa, which effectively lowered capacity worldwide by 7-8% at a time of fierce competition among shipowners for cargo.
Fun facts
•Winter in New Zealand is still a few months away, even if the weather in Canterbury over the last couple of days may make one wonder …
In Italy, however, the Winter Olympics are in full swing. In several disciplines, such as speed skating, figure skating, or ice hockey, competitors essentially benefit from the fact that steel can glide over ice at amazingly low rates of friction resistance. In 2022, Dutch speed skater Kjeld Nuis set a new world record for speed skating at 103 km/h:
The interesting thing is – we don’t know how it works. Not exactly, anyway. There have been several attempts to explain the low friction resistance of steel on ice, which can be observed over a relatively large range of temperature conditions. One is that the pressure of the steel creates a thin layer of water on the surface of the ice on which the skates ‘surf’ ahead.
Won’t work, say the experts, unless the skater weighs about as much as a fully-grown elephant.
A second explanation, first proffered by Michale Faraday more than 150 years ago, suggests that ice, like most crystalline substances, is covered by a thin layer of liquid – in this case water – while the main body still is solid.
Doesn’t work, either – that layer of water would be too thin to have the desired effect. Nor would it work at the temperatures well below freezing used by skating sports.
A third explanation claims that it’s the friction heat created by the skates that creates the film of water. If that were the case, speed skaters would use a material with a much lower thermal conductivity than steel to go even faster.
Two more recent scientific papers have looked at molecular dynamics at the ice-air interface. No surprise that most of the authors of the first paper are employed by academic research organisations in Amsterdam … and the authors of the second, most recent paper, used Europe’s most powerful supercomputer to simulate what happens when steel meets ice:
(a) Molecular configuration of a slice of ice subjected to nanoindentation at −10 °C during the initial stage of sliding with 𝑣0 =5 m/s. (b) Zoom of the region highlighted by the box in (a). Further zooms of other regions during sliding for adhesive [hydrophilic] (c) and nonadhesive [hydrophobic] (d) indenters. (e) Friction coefficient 𝜇 as a function of sliding distance 𝑑 normalized to the length 𝐿𝑥 =46 nm of the simulation cell along the sliding direction. Stars indicate the moment in time at which the snapshots shown in (a)–(d) were taken. (f) Penetration hardness ( 𝑃h) as a function of the indentation velocity using two normal loads. In all snapshots, only O─O bonds are shown for clarity. Visualizations of the atomic configurations are made using OVITO
However, neither of the claim to have found the full answer. Goes to show that sometimes we still don’t (fully) understand the fundamental processes underlying the natural phenomena we take advantage of …
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