Behind the Scenes of LandMark: Uncovering Isorine Marc & Jamii

Crowdsourced #1

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.

Our LandMark photographer Diana Nazareth interviewed her community partner Isorine Marc, who is the founder of Jamii, to uncover the story that would be translated into the photo essay for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.

Tell us about your mission? What was the inspiration for your idea/company/project?

In 2008, some of my neighbors and I came together to organize in The Esplanade neighborhood a few small but meaningful grassroots community activities throughout the summer days. Events ranged from outdoor barbecue to gardening, including bike clinics, movie nights and a mini arts festival. Within a couple of months, the change was obvious: after thirty years of living next to each other, neighbors started living with each other. This is the very core of Jamii’s inspiration.

I believe in one’s creativity; I believe in the power of arts to build our community stronger; I believe in people taking ownership of their public space; and I believe in the importance of nurturing a sense of pride of and belonging to the place where we live.

I founded Jamii in 2011. Jamii’s mandate is to enhance The Esplanade neighborhood’s vitality by initiating and producing arts-based community-engaged projects and events in and around Crombie Park.

The success of Jamii is not only in its vision, but also in the people and organizations that support it. The list is long, but it’s important for me to mention one of our greatest partner, CORPUS, the dance/theatre company I work for. It’s been a decade of taking arts to the street throughout the world. CORPUS has been supporting and partnering with Jamii – since the very beginning, to transform The esplanade with creativity.

The echoing of “change comes from within” resonates on The Esplanade. I’ve been living here since 2006, and I love my “village” – as I call it. The people I work with, engage with, partner with are my neighbors, friends, daughter’s friends, classmates, teachers (…). It ‘s not an outside force that comes in our homes to bring change: it’s us, Esplanadians, who create our tomorrow.

Blog2_Jamii

How would you describe yourself in 10 words or less?

Passionate, engaged, happy, social, driven, enthusiast, hard-working, persevering, focused, generous and loving. That’s 11.

What is most sacred to you?

As of today: my 2-yrs old daughter. She needs my love and guidance.

Who or what is a current influential force in your life?

The excitement burning in me when thinking of what’s possible.
The discipline to see things through.

What was the hardest part of growing up for you?

I can’t think of any: all was happening to get me all set for what was coming. What I love is continue growing up and getting ready for what’s always ahead.

What advice can you offer to young women with GOOD ideas today?

Trust that you’re capable and don’t think about it twice: just do it.

Where will you be in 5 years? What will your ‘mission’ look like?

I don’t know where I will be, maybe here – maybe there; but I know it will be nice and I’ll feel good about myself, about my life.
I hope that The Esplanade neighborhood will be thriving and as creative as ever, under the leadership of Jamii; and if not under its leadership, I hope that Jamii’s legacy will be in the air, one way or the other.

Where can we find out more about your project?

www.jamiiesplanade.org

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

Art_Tara

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.

Blog2

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.

 

Blog1

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.

blog3

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

Designing Toronto: Creating the Capacity to Convene

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.

13561912294_36deb0e506_b

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.

13561628883_863d4c0756_b

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.

13561896104_89847488a4_b

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.

Try3

 

TUF Stuff: An Afternoon with the Toronto Urban Fellows

On March 20th Exhibit Change spent the afternoon engaging with a great network of passionate change makers and professionals who really do want to move the City of Toronto in a positive direction. This amazing group is none other than the Toronto Urban Fellows.

13998764584_1f8456bd63_b

The Toronto Urban Fellows is an innovative program that has engaged 58 professionals to date in an intensive training of what it takes to run Canada’s largest city with respect to governance, operations and administration.

Balancing full-time work and various seminars, we were honoured to be invited to meet with the group to explore at a high level the value of the design thinking process.

Delivering one of our rapid fire workshops, we helped the Fellows to scratch the surface of how to challenge assumptions and making space to focus on the problem definition phase. The workshop was intentionally structured to highlight the value of avoiding our natural tendency to jump into the solutions we already know before we truly understand the people who will end up using these services.

13995125331_1fc9ecf4d2_b

The Toronto Urban Fellows demonstrated great energy and dove right into the workshop’s contents and concepts. It was an inspiring afternoon to say the least!

March Break Career Exploration: Rapid Fire DT4i

After last week’s 2-day DT4i training workshop, we dove right back into workshop mode with the amazing youth from Success Beyond Limits (SBL) last Wednesday. As part of SBL’s March Break Career Exploration, our DT4i rapid fire workshop sought to connect the topic of youth entrepreneurship with the benefits of the design-thinking process.

13127120954_72b064c21f_c

Condensing two days of content into one afternoon, we weren’t sure what to expect as we moved 45 youth through the phases of the design-thinking process.

We really wanted to show the benefits of why teams should spend more time in the problem defining phase before moving into the problem solving phase. The key is understanding how best to use empathy in articulating your user needs, a true foundation for human-centred design.

13126936003_b5c26415d0_c

It would be an understatement to say that the youth from Success Beyond Limits showed no end to generating new ideas. We were also impressed with how easily the youth could craft unique and detailed “point of views” or POVS through their user experience maps.

13126775295_173cf5ed62_c

The ability to zone in on a specific user stood out in contrast to the other workshop earlier in the week. What we realized was the key difference between our two workshop groups was the youth’s ability to freely design for a specific user.

Professional experience, it seems, drives people towards designing one solution for everyone so no one is excluded. While this might sound logical at first glance, in the end these solution more often than not are solution that don’t work for anyone.

13127049044_d9bdb3a598_c

Another impressive feat the SBL youth demonstrated was the lack of fear in focusing on the process versus focusing on the final product. Rather, the youth were quite comfortable to concentrate on the design tensions that revealed themselves from the crafted user POVs. The end result was a whole suite of very creative solutions that started off with exploring the design challenge of ice cream & social enterprise. Proposed projects included designing service robots for seniors, mobile app ideas, outlining ethical farming practices and developing a new approach to manufacture ice cream.

13126514775_c2f521bcf7_c

What we learned from SBL’s freedom to focus on the process over the product is our need to highlight and push working professionals to give themselves permission to be uncomfortable and vulnerable in the design-thinking process.  The longer term advantage is the ability to creatively come up with new solutions to wicked problems. Otherwise, focusing on the product or “end goal” allows you to fall into the pattern of trying to solve new problems with the feasible solutions you already know.

13126555843_21b39767f3_c

DT4i: Solving Complex Problems with Stakeholders

Last week was an incredible event-filled week that started off with our 2-day workshop DT4i: Solving Complex Problems with Stakeholders.

13126026864_4f71bd8fd2_c

As DT4i got underway, it was quickly obvious that we had convened a really interesting group that guaranteed that our participants would be bumping into the many assumptions common in their own work environment. This silo-busting group included educators, social innovators,  front line non-profit workers, municipal staff and provincial public servants.

13126499574_8cc87a075a_c

Using the theme of “ice cream & social enterprise” as the central challenge, the group divided up into teams to begin driving through the design-thinking process. Beginning with the critical, and sometimes the most awkward step, we find that the amount of time that any teams spent in the empathy phase will often determine the dynamics of the team, the work flow and ultimately the creativity in the outcomes of the process.

To help with the storming, forming and norming of the new project teams, we asked the workshop group to stop often to reflect on where they think they were in the process framed in our Task, Team & Self exercise. The first assumption of the day we helped to challenge was the expectation that feedback is useful for a later time or simply to reflect upon. Once gathering and compiling the room’s thoughts on the fly, we brought back the data and gave each team the opportunity to take ownership of their reflection and implement the feedback in realtime. The first piece of feedback was the need to set ground rules of how each team will work together to make sure everyone could brainstorm openly and generate.

13126280023_eac3a643a1_c

Also, moving through the process not once but twice over the two days allowed each participant to be pushed out of their comfort zone, reflect upon what had happened and figure out what they would do differently… and then do it all over again. The benefit of coming to DT4i is not just the opportunity to identify and challenge your assumptions that we all bring into problem defining & framing but our ability to pivot our thinking and work plan based on real time feedback.

13125961813_79f6e7f356_c

Check out the conversation that happened over on Twitter and find out when you can join us at our next event.

 

SxSW Edu: In the Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking

This week Jennifer Chan & Exhibit Change are in Austin, Texas for the 4-Day SxSWedu conference.

This is a jam-packed week filled with some of the most energetic and innovative leaders from all aspects of the education system in North America. This week we’re looking forward to making new connections, exploring potential collaborations, and pushing the conversation of how to bring positive change through design thinking to the way we teach and learn.

EDUP20708

Starting off the week strong, Jenn joined 3 other speakers yesterday on the panel “In the Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking.”  Not only was it a great conversation about learning through failure and the challenges and opportunities of using design thinking, it brought to life many of the great relationships that have formed through the weekly #dtk12chat conversations.

Bh0sC9ACQAABKAj

Stay tuned for more updates from #SxSWedu as the week unfolds. Also follow Jennifer Chan on Twitter to see the action as it happens.

 

TEDx Talk: The Awkwardness of Collaboration

Did you miss out on Jenn’s TEDx Talk earlier this month? Not to worry! We have the whole video right here.

 

For the 5th annual TEDx event at the YMCA Academy, Jenn’s talk was centred on the importance, and sometimes awkwardness, of collaborations. Jenn joined 9 other speakers from all facets of education to discuss the theme of EduMakers and sought to explore how might we create new connections between social innovators and educators.

With the YMCA Academy TEDx Talk under her belt, Jenn is heading to SXSW next week where she will be pushing forward the conversation of bringing design thinking into education. If you’re in Austin, TX for south-by you can see Jenn speaking on the March 3rd panel called “In the Trenches with K-12 Design Thinking.”

Slide03

Looking Back on GEM Design Lab 2

GroupChatWith Design Lab 1 completed back in November, we moved forward into our second Design Lab this past weekend with a goal to dive much deeper into service design territory. Specifically, we set out to explore how might we balance the needs and expectations of our two user groups: mentors and mentees.

Screen shot 2014-02-10 at 2.22.06 PMWatch a video recap of Design Lab 1

As usual, GEM was an amazing team to work with; the ladies really jumped into each activity and were able to generate lots of ideas and data for us to pour over in the days ahead. Iterating off of feedback from Design Lab 1, we structured the Design Lab 2 work to dig more into people’s expectations, interests and levels of customization for a mentor program. What contributed to the success of Design Lab 2 was our ability to pull out both individual opinions as well as what was the group consensus.

AdvisorsWe were happy to hear that the girls felt like their voices were being heard and that they genuinely helping to share the GEM program. It is also inspiring to see the GEM girls actively asking questions and provoking new thinking around how to evolve the exceptions of the mentorship program into a truly user-centred design. Can’t wait until Design Lab 3!

Presenting: CatalystsX, Our February Tune Up Project

Our first Tune Up for 2014 is coming up on Saturday, February 22. We are excited to grow our Tune Up community and have great news about our challenging February Tune Up project.

Screen Shot 2014-01-27 at 4.41.36 PM

Presenting: CatalystsX!

Cx is a community of people building a culture of personal & systems transformation towards a better future. Cx acts as a shared platform for change agents across Canada working towards transforming the future.

The February Tune Up project will explore the challenges of engaging and sustaining a network of social innovators across Canada, both online and offline.

Ready to start putting your design-thinking knowledge into action? Register here.

PostItWall

About Tune Up

Tune Up is hands-on design thinking applied to a real world wicked problem. Anchoring the conversation in reality, the workshop engages both an organization with an identified problem as well as individuals eager to practice and experience the design-thinking process. The ultimate goal for Tune Up is to expose both the organization and the designers to the design thinking process and facilitate collaborative learning.

Click here for more information on Tune Up.