By the time an exhibition closes, something has usually settled. The argument has landed — or it hasn't.
'Walking sticks & canes' at Objectspace closes on 30 August. If you haven't seen it, you have a few weeks left. But the conversation Keiji Takeuchi started with this exhibition doesn't close with it. It's the kind of thinking that stays.
What the exhibition was really asking
Takeuchi is a furniture and industrial designer — Milan-based, New Zealand-bred, globally connected. He built this exhibition from a simple observation made over years of travel: in Japan, canes tended toward the functional and practical; in Europe, they were more personal, more emotional. He started collecting them. And the more he looked, the more he saw an object that had been quietly abandoned by serious design thinking.
His question wasn't "how do we make a better walking stick?" It was sharper than that. Why, he asked, would giving someone a walking stick as a gift feel like an insult? What happened to an object that was once a mark of authority, a tool for crossing difficult terrain, even a weapon — that it ended up here?
The answer he arrived at: stigma. Slow-accumulated, culturally embedded stigma. Not the object's fault. Not the user's. A failure of the design world to keep paying attention.
The 19 designers in the exhibition — Jasper Morrison, Cecilie Manz, Alberto Meda, Pierre Charpin and 15 others — are his answer to that failure. Each stick in the Objectspace show is a different designer's response to the same brief: take this seriously.
On patina, and objects worth keeping
One of the ideas Takeuchi returns to is patina. He describes it to students this way: imagine two tables, both well designed and clean. One gets damaged. Most people want to discard the damaged one — the pristine version is right there to compare it against. But what if the damage was the point? What if the mark of use was the object getting better, not worse?
This is a mind-set shift, and he thinks it's starting to catch on. The condition for it is emotional engagement — which is a design problem, not a user problem. If an object is made well enough that someone sees it as part of their life, they take care of it. They keep using it. The relationship between person and object deepens rather than ends.
A walking stick carried daily, for years, develops exactly this kind of history. The grain of a wooden stem warms with handling. The grip shapes to a hand. These aren't flaws accumulating — they're evidence of a life being lived with something well made.
This is why material choice matters so much to us. FSC hardwood — oak or walnut — doesn't just look considered. It behaves like a living material over time. It rewards use. The ooak Uno is designed to be carried for years, not replaced in months.
The bigger idea
Takeuchi's closing thought in the Monocle interview that accompanied the exhibition's tour is the one that stays with you. The walking stick, he says, is just a vehicle for a bigger idea — that someone, no matter their age, wants to move and get out into the world. That's what this is all about: bringing that spirit back into society, through the design of a simple object.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Not a compensatory object. Not a concession. A designed thing that carries a person's intention to keep moving, keep going, keep being in the world. The design either honours that intention or it doesn't. Most walking sticks currently available don't. That's the gap. That's what Takeuchi's exhibition made visible, and what the designers in it tried to close.
It's the same gap ooak was built to close — from the other direction, as makers rather than curators. Different method, same conviction.
Go before it closes
'Walking sticks & canes' is at Objectspace's Chartwell Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, until 30 August 2026. Free entry, Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am–4pm.
The Objectspace Christchurch space remains open usual hours with another exceptional exhibition, Martino Gamper, at the Sir Miles Warren Gallery.
If this exhibition has made you think differently about what you carry — or what you might give — the ooak Uno starts at $198 NZD and is available in oak or walnut, four colourways, three sizes.
