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Our Tune Up Experience Tackling Accessibility

Posted on November 2, 2014November 3, 2014 by Terrence Ho

Last year, we hosted a Tune Up Workshop with Equal Grounds. Tune Up, is a hands-on design workshop taking ideas to action while practicing how to co-design solutions with users. For Tune Up last year, we had 20 practicing design thinkers and 4 people from Equal Grounds participate in designing 4 possible ways that Equal Grounds could offer services and get their enterprise off the ground. Here is a blog from Co-Founder, Terrence Ho.

It’s been almost a year since we participated in the Exhibit Change Tune Up back in December 2013.

Equal Grounds started in 2013 a few years after my brother Torrance graduated from college and could not find employment. We decided that if employers were not willing to provide opportunities we would create opportunities for him instead. After prototyping different things that he could do from data entry for small businesses to running a petition campaign, we were contacted by a family friend that heard about our project and wanted her son to be involved who also has muscular dystrophy. That’s when I realized there are many more individuals that are impacted besides my brother and his friend.

We brought our team to Tune Up because we felt we needed clarity in our direction and whether what we are tackling and our problem definition of “how do we create employment opportunities for people with disabilities” is actually true or a problem that doesn’t exist.

There were four key concepts that came out of Tune Up:

Internship Concept – whereby a company brings on an individual with accessible needs into their workplace for a short period of time or on a small project to see of there’s a fit.
Accessibility Website – as a source for information on AODA and consulting services.
Accessibility Centre – where individuals with disabilities can work from, with on site attendants to allow persons to work remotely for other companies and have proper care. It was even suggested that we have a remote site in a warmer climate of Florida!
Accessibility Association and Awards – bringing together all organizations working on employment and accessibility and awarding other organizations and companies that have achieved and gone beyond the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) standards.

What these concepts from the design thinkers that day did for us is validate our concepts that we were testing and have thought about.

Nine months after Tune Up this is where we are, still tackling the opportunity of “how can we create employment opportunities for people with disabilities?” There are three key initiatives we are focused on:

1) Inclusive Consulting: We designed and pitched an accessible consultancy at the Emerging Leaders Network (ELN) Studio and Showcase where we received positive feedback from the panel. Our main focus is to provide AODA audits, training and strategic/metric development. This has spun into its own entity called Employable Accessible People. We are currently building our team of consultants as we gear up for our first client.

2) Arts and Socialization: We’ve also been prototyping a wheelchair dance and theatre program for the last seven months. With eight core members we continue to adjust our program to meet our member’s needs. We teach everything from line dance and salsa to improv activities. We were recently invited to participate in the opening ceremonies of the ParaPan Am Games in 2015. We are very excited with this opportunity and continue to look for more individuals with mobility needs to join our wheelchair/scooter dance and theatre program.

3) Writing and Awareness: Our third endeavor is our Enables Me network around raising awareness through writing. We have a team of writers sharing their personal experiences and to report on accessibility news locally and abroad on topics from sports, work, travel and technology. You can read the stories at:

Our objective is to become a go to source for accessibility stories and information online. We continue to look for writers that want to share their personal experiences and to report on accessibility news.

As you can tell our work continues to evolve well after Tune Up, we are thankful for the opportunity to have the minds of so many thoughtful and experienced individuals that day.

— Terrence

A HUGE thank you to Terrence for recounting this story for us to share.

Gazebo Confessionals: A Partnership with the Institute Without Boundaries

Posted on October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 by Jenn Chan

From its conception, LandMark was designed to have 3 main components: a community engagement element, a citizen design lab and photo-stories. The citizen design lab was originally imagined to be an interactive city-building space where participants could build and rebuild the city throughout the night, highlighting that city-building is never done by one person alone.

As LandMark grew as a project, we knew that strengthening our community partnerships meant collaborating with different organizations so when the opportunity to collaborate with Institute Without Boundaries arose, we knew we had to embrace the opportunity.

We met with the new incoming students in early September to share the initial concepts but really to create the container for a LandMark citizen design lab that would take on a new spin. We didn’t want to dictate what the students could or could not do, that would defeat the purpose of the collaboration. We shared the same creative brief with the students that our photographers worked with and knew that the openness might be daunting at first, but it offered a lot of opportunity for creativity and originality.

The IwB class is a small group of about 10-12 students. In an afternoon of brainstorming and ideation, they came up with two ideas that eventually became the Gazebo Confessionals and a Fondest Memories Wall. Both installations offered visitors a way to interact with LandMark either by individually sharing a story on the Memory Wall or connect with a stranger or several.

A HUGE thanks to the students of IwB who toughed it out for LandMark and really helped us animate St. James Park in an exciting way.

Wrapping up LandMark

Posted on October 28, 2014October 28, 2014 by Jenn Chan

It is hard to believe that a little less than a month ago, we stayed up all night in St. James Park for LandMark. This project was an unbelievable triumph of community partnerships and stories.

In February, we submitted a proposal for a Scotiabank Nuit Blanche independent project following a few conversations with the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIA. The idea for LandMark was born out of a goal to capture stories and bridge together different community organizations from the neighbourhood to complete one goal.

We specifically chose St. James Park as the site for our proposal, as it is a site rich with history and controversy. It is well known as the site of the Occupy Toronto protest and demonstration in 2011, the site of the St. James Cathedral which is the first church in the city of York and where you can still take bell-ringing classes, and now it is home to Music in the St. James Park where you can enjoy free concerts in the park on Thursdays throughout the summer. We knew this was a park of many layers and it was those layers that inspired the theme of LandMark.

To uncover the city, layer by layer.

This theme alongside the curatorial mission to capture the stories of everyday heroes, LandMark emerged as a one-time event that can only be created by these partners at this time.

What is remarkable about this project, is that each of the partners were like a moving piece of well-oiled machine, without each other, this project would never have come to life in the way that it did. Much like a community, we are a series of individual pieces that can operate separately, but collectively can accomplish larger goals without taking on the entire workload individually.

It is our goal to take what we have learned from LandMark and put it into longer and continuous community partnership projects in the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood and strengthen the foundation that has been built.

Behind the Scenes of LandMark: Tara Noelle & Young People’s Theatre

Posted on October 6, 2014October 7, 2014 by Colin Lacey

LandMark was a month-long community engagement project that Exhibit Change ran in partnership with the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIA.

Involving over 40 partnerships is make it a reality, one of the key elements of the project was the matching of our team of photographers with local organizations in order to highlight how these community projects are helping to make Toronto a great city to live in.

We interviewed Product Magazine photographer Tara Noelle about her experience in photographing the volunteers at Young People’s Theatre.

What’s your background and why photography?

I am a local based portrait photographer who studied Fine Arts and Film Photography at OCADU. I stepped away from mix media art work to focus more solely on photography as a medium and career.

I enjoy that a great photo can suggest many emotions regardless of their subject, in a way suggesting everything while revealing nothing. Why photography? I could be here forever… there are so many why’s, so why not?

Tell us about what inspired you after meeting up with your community partner?

Where to begin? While exploring the space, I was impressed by the quality of the in-house custom designers, and who could forget the story about how the large stage is supposedly haunted? However, what soon became clear to me was that the strength of Young People’s Theatre is truly the young teenage volunteers who bring YPT to life.

What was the concept that guided the creation of your Scotiabank Nuit Blanche photo essay?

I wanted to try convey as much as possible about the people behind the scenes of YPT in one photo but still keep my minimalist portrait style in mind.

Connect with Tara: taranoelle.ca | Facebook: Tara Noelle Photography | Twitter:@taranoellephoto | Instagram: @taranoellephoto

Why we love Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation

Posted on July 8, 2014September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

We arrived home from a few days in Atlanta last week working with the amazing team at Mount Vernon Presbyterian school, in particular the team behind the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation. The Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation (MVIFI) is headed up by the spectacular Bo Adams and is built on a culture of 3 pillars, design thinking, global competitiveness and citizen leadership. Obviously, we are especially drawn to a school that has design thinking as one of its core values and we love learning with MVIFI as they are growing in this area.

Here are the top 3 reasons we love MVIFI:

1. The People

I have had the pleasure of working with and getting to know several of the MVP folks and can without a doubt say they are some of my favourite people to collaborate with. They have truly taken on design thinking as a way of life at Mount Vernon. It is hard not to be drawn into the southern hospitality and accents of the MVP crew, they have welcomed us into their homes, hearts and minds throughout the 2 years that we have been working together. Ultimately my favourite part about working with MVP is the fact that they are always creating ideas to take into action and learn from. It is part of their “Ship It” philosophy to put ideas out into the world early rather than letting them percolate behind closed doors. This nature and culture creates a team of people who know how to value the generation of ideas and have a getting it done attitude that can’t be beat. I have especially enjoyed jamming with Mary Cantwell, Trey Boden, Chris Andres, TJ Edwards, James Campbell, Emily Breite, Chip Houston and of course Bo Adams. It is the dedication that these folks have to ongoing learning about design thinking and a never-ending perseverance to keep striving the change education.

2. The MVP Norms

Start with Questions, Share the Well, Assume the Best, Fail Up & Have Fun

These norms are posted up around the school, celebrated and embedded. Certainly aligned with design thinking mindsets and with the uncertainty of learning in the 21st century. Rooted in assuming the best and starting with questions, these norms honour the fact that when we just to preconceived assumptions without discovering facts and uncovering the unknown we are setting ourselves and others up for upset. Share the well and have fun celebrate success from big to small and demonstrate a playful nature to facing the challenges ahead. My personal favourite is Fail Up, one that we have taken on as part of our repertoire and most certainly resonate with the most. MVP has a tradition of celebrating Fail Up moments and even have an official ceremony each year for a teacher or student who has demonstrated getting up from a failure and showing their grit and resilience from learning from their mistakes. This is something that we need to see more.

3. The Collaborations

Well obviously, our collaboration with MVP has been most valuable for our learning and theirs, but the collaborations don’t stop there. While we were at Fuse we learned of so many more collaborations that are underway and in development. MVIFI actively seeks non-traditional collaboration opportunities to deliver real-world opportunities for their students and teachers to learn from. This year MVP partnered with The Museum of Design in Atlanta (MODA) for students to design and building an exhibit on design thinking featuring a giant David Kelley inspired moustache and glasses, in development a partnership with Thrive LLC a local design firm in Atlanta for students to see where the design thinking skills they are learning could take them in a corporate setting and of course the many collaborations that brought Fuse to life. We had so much fun working alongside MVP, Greg Bamford from Leadership & Design and the many coaches from the #dtk12chat community. The best part about collaborations is that they are not one-sided. Everyone learns from what they put in.

Urban Design Guerillaz: 100 in 1 day

Posted on June 5, 2014September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

We are Guerillaz!

On June 7th, we are participating in 1 of 100 urban interventions across the city of Toronto alongside a team of Urban Design Guerillaz.

The Urban Design Guerrillaz were started by brother-sister team Amos and Karen Shaw after an ice cream outing where they noticed a street corner that could use some love. Ever since then they have been performing Guerrillaz operations throughout the city and this weekend we find ourselves in Jane and Finch.

In preparation for this weekend’s Jam we joined the UDG at the Driftwood St. Alban’s Boys and Girls Club on May 29th for a quick design jam to see what ideas were emerging. The all boys group talked about space for quiet homework, loud video games, a girls lounge, a new kitchen, an improved and welcoming outside and an indoor park and beautification.

While we didn’t limit the brainstorming the ideas were mostly practical and really demonstrated the place that this drop-in centre has in the community. Simple tasks like cleaning the windows and throwing away junk was quickly added to the to-do list. In addition to a laundry list of video games.

The group will be joining us again on June 7th to participate in Evergreen’s 100 in 1 day. We will be in charge of rallying the troupes and getting everyone motivated for a day of work. The guys at the jam have already signed up for roles and will be leading tasks like storytelling and getting resources. The most popular role is the Ninja. A role suited for a person that is good at working in the shadows and getting things done without needing to be asked.

Come out on Saturday from 10am – 6pm or support the intervention with a donation of time, money or resources.

An Experiment: Learning About Design Thinkers

Posted on May 27, 2014September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

In April, we put out a quick survey called “Learning About Design Thinkers”. The goal was simple: ask questions, get answers and then see what to do next. So the task of putting a survey out and getting folks to offer input was fairly simple.

The outcome of this experiment? We had 62 responses from across Canada and the United States and a few international guest appearances from China and Australia. Undoubtedly, if we had pushed this harder through our networks we might have received different answers and therefore different results. At this point, we are satisfied with the data set we have acquired and of course we are still hungry for more – this was just as much a test of the character our network as it was an experiment to learn more about design thinkers.

Before I dive into the first overview of the collected responses, I just want to share a story about this very iterative process. I had been sharing the survey for about 3 weeks when one of my online colleagues messaged me privately and said that he really wanted to help but that the questions felt a little daunting. We had a discussion and through the back and forth came to the conclusion that it would be helpful to add a disclaimer in to the survey to articulate that the results were not there to be judged and in fact I wouldn’t even be looking at them in connection to anyone’s name. Additionally, adding some subtext to each question to further frame the type of conversation we were hoping to spark. As a facilitator, I like to leave questions to interpretation, especially since there is no right or wrong answer, but in this case if more context helped people participate than that was a greater goal. So, I want to thank Dan Ryder for our feedback session!

The intent with this survey is to use this information to learn more about the people who are working around us. So that we may gain empathy for people practicing, learning and teaching design thinking alongside us; to articulate challenges that our clients might be facing; and to explore challenges and insights without a central context. As a tool, a survey comes with its own set of baggage. We understood this going into this discovery experiment, we are thankful to everyone that took the time to sit down and respond. We recognize that we have all participated in our fair share of surveys, whether it be for evaluation, for testing, or for entering a contest.

Initially when we launched this survey, I thought the easiest way to share the responses would be to simply post them, raw and undigested. Having reviewed the many responses and being able to see the great depth, the level of vulnerability and the honesty that was shared, I don’t feel like that would be an appropriate use of the trust shared between the responders and us. Plus, there are many overarching themes from the results that seem to be tying this community of practitioners together; it would be a missed opportunity to draw out these insights to help us move towards better incorporating design thinking into our every day.

In the weeks ahead, I will be sharing our reflections from each question and will ultimately use this information to craft tools to try and respond the best we can to some of the overlapping challenges.

The questions in the survey focused on our favourite areas of Task, Team, Self. We believe that this tool is a great entry point for reflection and learning in the journey of leveraging the design thinking process. Looking into the results, I am intrigued by the tensions I am noticing in responses and how that creates opportunities to start understanding gaps that we have in the design thinking process.

Designing Toronto: Creating the Capacity to Convene

Posted on May 23, 2014September 3, 2014 by Colin Lacey

The evolution of Designing Toronto as an idea has come a long way since its first inception back in 2013. Originally envisioned as a weekend workshop about navigating the planning system, Howard Tam of ThinkFresh Group and Jennifer Chan of Exhibit Change brought together a community of people to try to figure out how to take this idea to action.

Originally, the Designing Toronto team was focused on how we could support people to better navigate the planning and unplanning spaces, ultimately helping to get new community projects off the ground. What soon become obvious to the group was that part of the value of Designing Toronto was the ability to bring together some of the diverse and passionate players in the city-building community.

Opportunity in Failure.

As planning for Designing Toronto unfolded, we soon hit conceptual road blocks around whether or not our solution was solving a real problem and what resources we needed to see it through. Through research and conversations, there was no doubt about an interest in seeing more support for citizen-led projects. Our main question was whether or not pushing Designing Toronto to deliver a course on Toronto’s planning system would be the kind of support that citizen-led projects needed. Perhaps it is one part of a more holistic solution. Then there was the issue of generating a sustainable business model to deliver this new service.

Needless to say, our doubt and our collectively stretched resources were starting to wear at our enthusiasm.

What we soon realized was that many other groups had been in this groan zone that our team had suddenly found itself in. This realization would be a critical insight into the way forward – it was time for us to pivot instead of charging ahead.

To better understand this phase in the project development, we needed to learn from those who had already been here. We wanted to convene a group of projects that had jumped through and beyond this zone, we wanted to hear about the projects that has been consumed by failing to move beyond this point, and we wanted to speak with those teams that had just arrived with their fresh ideas. Thus, the dezTO Hackathon was born.

On March 29th, Designing Toronto convened a room of curious community-builders, planners and serial social entrepreneurs. The full-day event allowed us to hear war stories from the creative minds behind the now defunct Toronto Urban Exchange (TUX), to learn from the experience and expertise of ClearVillage, a London, UK-based nonprofit, to better understand the challenges facing Green Change, a Jane & Finch community space, and to meet the open government guru helping to incubate the Toronto Changes concept.

Since then, we’ve been working hard at digesting and synthesizing the harvest of ideas and actions that came out of the Designing Toronto hackathon. The creative brief on citizen-led projects in Toronto will outline case studies of ideas that had struggled plus highlighting the themes common between each of the citizen projects that were hosted during the dezTO hackathon. Pushing this creative brief into a call to action, we will outline what these projects need, and where you can help, to move these initiatives into their next iteration.

The creative brief will be out very shortly! So make sure to sign up for our newsletter to ensure you get a PDF copy when it comes out, hot off the presses.

Building Ownership and Capacity: Give the Gift of Holding

Posted on May 22, 2014September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

What is the role of holding?

It is a powerful gift to give someone something that they didn’t ask for and that they didn’t even know they wanted.

Or is it? This is a question that has been running in the back of my head for the past few weeks.

Primarily this swirling around after we came back from EdCamp Manitoulin and I was thinking about EdCamp Design Thinking that we helped pot on in the fall. Being at EdCamp Manitoulin reminded me how important it is for people to organize the event, to put out the invitation and to help convene the conversation. And the even better part is when they get to participate in the conversations. It is undoubtedly the hardest part of being a facilitator is being the one to hold the conversations and not fully get to participate. It was our pleasure to be able to give that gift to EdCamp Manitoulin. We were happy to step in and carry that weight for the EdCamp Manitoulin team so that they could do what they needed to do, which was be with their guests and host the party. It was a stress that we are used to carrying and gave us a chance to practice our documentation and harvesting techniques.

Last year, I called a group together to host EdCamp Design Thinking and we were able to put on a fabulous event with over 70 people and a beautiful salad club lunch. I think it was what people needed. A place to connect, to be with peers and to have conversations about education.

Just tonight, I was at a powerful lecture about an innovative program that talks about the “professional in the background” and it struck me that there is an intense need for the “expert” to hold the space for practice and process to occur, but to let others take the reigns. The structures supporting the container can stand up on their own and can be filled in with gentle coaching and check-ins. It isn’t as simple as just passing the torch and walking away. But rather a process of building trust, showing how, growing confidence and lending support to make mistakes.

Now, I am wondering how to we build ownership and capacity to have others hold EdCamp Design Thinking? What if no one wants to? If someone does, how do we support them? Does anyone what to take over? We are here to help you hold it!

The Future of Camaraderie

Posted on May 21, 2014September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

As March came in faster than a speeding bullet, our time at the Situation Lab came to a close. After wishing Jeff Watson and Stuart Candy farewell, our search for our new home began in earnest. Not wanting to settle for just any place, we decided to embrace the Café Nomad lifestyle in the meantime. The good news? Nearly a month ago, we stopped being nomads and moved in with Camaraderie Coworking!

We are pretty excited to give up our nomadic ways. While working from home and coffee shops was productive, we knew it couldn’t hold up forever. There is just something about being able to create that boundary from work and life and not having to buy endless coffees to have a place to meet. And they really don’t like it when you want to do post-it note brainstorming.

We are now the Innovators-in-Residence at Camaraderie Coworking and will be starting a foresight project as we settle into our new home.

The framing for this project is based on the definition of Camaraderie: a feeling of good friendship among the people in a group.

Our proposal is to work on a project that we are calling “The Future of Camaraderie.” This project will develop 4 scenarios based on current trends in the co-working industry projected 25 years out into the future. We believe that this project will offer intellectual collateral tied to the work and vision of the co-working space. This project will also be a great way for us to engage with the members of Camaraderie in a foresight activity to help us better understanding the work culture of freelancers.

We can guarantee that we will be sharing our process and learnings along the way.

We will be practicing using foresight as a tool and methodology to explore current trends and drivers of change, a process that is meant to provoke strategies. Foresight is not to be used as a predictive tool but more so to create reactions and conversation. It is an exploration of the plausible. Strategic foresight is a combination of participatory design, research and systems thinking. We will be using Jim Dator’s work on four generic futures as the framework for this foresight work.

Camaraderie Coworking itself is part of the larger co-working ecosystem in a variety of ways, as co-founder Rachel Young is a member of Coworking Toronto & Coworking Ontario. This gives us access to coworking conversations happening locally, regionally, provincially and systemically. Trends and conversations of how freelancers and small businesses are coming together is permeating the culture of coworking spaces and actively influence the way we see the workplace.

Through this project we plan to research and explore the emerging trends that are effecting the way we work socially, technologically, ecologically, economically, and politically. Additionally looking back in history as to when we did similar activities to what we do now. At the end of this process we may end up with a shared vision document, strategies to support the uncertain future of coworking or any variety of services or products to prototype.