Sharing Stories of Making Community Places, Youth Initiatives & Leadership: DM2020 x RXYM

Research project Design ManifesT.O. 2020 (DM2020) teams up with Rexdale Youth Mentorship (RXYM) to share stories of placemaking, youth initiatives and leadership in the Queensplate community, North West Toronto. The series of events will include a joint survey about placemaking in neighbourhoods, an online youth forum in February, and a virtual artist talk and exploration of education pathways in art & design led by OCAD U students and recent grads. RXYM's stated mission is to "create safe spaces for racialized youth by providing them with tangible personal and professional tools to positively support their development into young adulthood.” See more at https://www.facebook.com/rxym.mentors/.

DM2020 is a two-year narrative inquiry project compiling stories of grassroots placemaking through creative practices as a way to support and learn from community actions. As a follow up to the project’s ‘Creative Practice as Protest’ (CPP) workshop under a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant that was held last year, Associate Professor Cheryl Giraudy, Assistant Professor, Saskia van Kampen, and Urban Planner, Lena Phillips will engage with RXYM to co-design a report of findings and recommendations aimed to benefit the community and research. RXYM identified the need for youth to flourish, not only through recreational programming, but through programs that build professional skills and social awareness. These goals are aligned with DM2020’s aim to foster youth and other community participation in research that explores inclusive creative practices for equitable city making. 

If you live in the Rexdale / Queens Plate neighbourhood, you are invited to take part in the following survey: https://sfsu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eWJMzebEfocA0Dz

 

This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

SSHRC Logo

Image of Youth participants working in groups as part of the Creative Practice as Protest Workshop held at OCAD U in January 202
Image of Youth participants working in groups as part of the Creative Practice as Protest Workshop held at OCAD U in January 202
Friday, January 29, 2021 - 11:00am

DESIGN MANIFEST.O. AND CREATIVE PRACTICE AS PROTEST

“It was nice to see everyone coming together to solve problems that not many people take time to figure out. I think that workshops like these enable us and make us feel that our voice does matter” - T. Alexander, photographer and artist, Toronto.

Associate Professor Cheryl Giraudy, Faculty of Design and Assistant Professor Saskia van Kampen, School of Design (San Francisco State University) hosted the workshop ‘Creative Practice as Protest’ (CPP) with SSHRC grant partner Colloqate Design, an award-winning platform for racial, social, and cultural equity of public spaces and places. Co-founder Bryan C. Lee Jr. architect and activist joined the research team including Lead Research Assistant Lena Phillips (Urban Development Planner), assistants Nicholas Sagar (Photography) and Jun Li (Digital Futures) to welcome youth ages18–25 from across Toronto to share collective aspirations for a more equitable Toronto.

CPP is one of several events aligned with the research project Design Wo/ManifesT.O. (DM2020) launched at DesignTO in 2019. The project is a two-year effort to learn about grassroots initiatives fostering respectful design for placemaking, and place-keeping, and has engaged over 100 participants to date, including community youth leaders attending the workshop. Lena Philips brought her extensive experience in engagement of diverse young stakeholders to the effort, helping to shift focus from a student ‘ideas competition‘ to an ‘Youth ideas forum’ where next generation of creative practitioners and activists could network, create new alliances and develop solutions for the myriad of challenges and opportunities they perceive Toronto holds. Partnership with Colloqate offered a new framing for the forum and dovetailed with the non-profit’s current design justice work with Black Lives Matter Toronto. During the morning session, Colloqate inspired the audience with several themes including: making co-design for social justice a reality; how next gen become creative practitioners for action; who holds power in planning for communities, and how to access power effectively for justice in placemaking. The session unpacked equity, identity, and liberation in social structures in order to achieve/reclaim these states going forward. The afternoon session focused on re-imagination of Toronto for greater representation and inclusion, particularly for communities where voices of lived realities in decision-making are suppressed. 

Creative mentors joined CPP including: Jay Wall, Founder, Rally Rally design studio for social change; Jaicyea Smith MDes (Inclusive Design) Founder, Toronto Skate Stop and Her Buddah Belly; Sean Lee, Artistic Director-Tangled Art + Disability; Melanie Printup-Hope, Associate Dean, Faculty of Design Educator, Indigenous visual culture, graphic designer; Marcela Cordero, MDes (Interdisciplinary Design Strategy, George Brown) and Adwua Afful, Black Futures Now and Mapping Black Futures Project.

Many community leaders from a diverse range of organizations were invited to participate including Benjamin Bongolan, Coordinator, Newcomer Family Settlement Services at The 519, LGBTQ community hub; Abba Wie-Addo, Sr. Progam Leader, Rexdale Youth Mentorship Program, and Cheryll Case, Founder, Principal Urban Planner of CP Planning and Urban Design Coordinator, City of Brampton. Over the lunch break, artist Randell Adjei Founder, Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere (R.I.S.E Edutainment) used the art of spoken word to not only inspire the participants, but demonstrate how a powerful tool such as creative practice can share lived experiences, and foster respect for community and identity. R.I.S.E Edutainment is one of Toronto’s largest and longest running youth-led initiatives.

Mentors and community leaders were key to supporting participation, fostering responses for creative planning exercises and supporting participants in confirming themselves as change-makers. The engagement across disciplines, community groups, and individuals was intense and lead to the development of bold ideas, and practical solutions to issues of exclusion and lack of empowerment in city planning and design processes. Outcomes of the workshop are from the pre-Covid-19 timeframe, and pre-global discussion on systemic racism and need for systemic and significant change across socio-economic, cultural, health, and justice platforms. As the research extends into a new era, new shared lived experiences will be added to the growing database of emerging strategies and tools for both addressing community need in building a more inclusive city, and in designing the spaces and places that define it.

30 youth participants registered for the event and a further 42 on a waiting list. The response indicates the need for more opportunities for youth to come together to vision a future based on real world experience and imagination of what can be. Listening to the deep and heartfelt stories of trying to keep and make spaces/places in the city reflect and respect the communities they serve via the open forums and workshops is yielding both expected and unexpected outcomes. DM2020 continues to gather the creative endeavours with the aim of co-designing community-based, socially-driven design tools for greater inclusive placemaking across Toronto and elsewhere.

Additional Notes:

CPP was published in Toronto’s Caribbean Newspaper, February 2020. Reporter and youth participant Selina Macallum interviewed research partner Bryan Lee Jr. about Colloqate’s work in supporting, engaging, black and other racialized communities and in fostering designers and architects in the US and Canada for greater equity in designing the public realm. https://torontocaribbean.com/using-art-to-design-a-future-home-for-all-colloqate/

DM2020 is planning its next community-based forum (online) aiming to engage youth activists specifically from west Toronto in discussions for both evolving the online public square and planning of physical spaces with social justice and social distancing principles in a Covid-19 era.

Saskia gave an online presentation at the10th Annual International Conference on Urban Studies & Planning hosted by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. The paper titled: Building “Working with, not for” into Design Studio Curriculum explores the outcomes of the CPP, reaffirming ‘ethics’ based on human-centred and participatory approaches as intrinsic to the discipline and pedagogy of design. The full paper will be published in the Athens Journal of Architecture in Fall 2020.


Cheryl Giraudy, B.Arch. MSc. OAA MRAIC has 30 years as a practicing architect and 20 years teaching at OCAD U, and supporting and leading research for the built environment with course-based projects, external partnerships, and academic granted work. She has held posts of Associate Dean in the Faculty of Design, and interim Graduate Program Director, Inclusive Design, an emerging discipline in which she holds an MSc. in design from the University of Salford, UK. She teaches in the Environmental Design program in third and fourth year, and undertakes participatory research focused on diverse communities across Toronto that have been underrepresented in decision-making for the design of the public realm. She fosters co-design strategies for equitable placemaking along with the accessible navigation of them. Projects include work with Toronto Community Housing, Bayview Hospital, and other Toronto community engagements through DM2020 research. Cheryl contributed to the provincial association of architects as Chair of the OAA Honours and Awards program for many years bringing about new award categories including Best Emerging Practice, and was a long-time consultant for an international organization employing ‘whole building’ standards, and human-centred approaches to programming and planning large complexes such as government offices, embassies, and more.


Saskia van Kampen (MDes, RGD, AIGA) has taught graphic Design at OCAD University as an Assistant Professor since 2014 and is now Assistant Professor of Visual Communication at San Francisco State University. She is focused on developing research projects that involve students, believing that by doing so she is supporting the next generation of designers to be socially driven in terms of accessible and inclusive design outcomes. Her research includes critical pedagogy in studio design courses, writing in the disciplines, and codesign practices. Before moving to the States, she was the Vice President of Education and board member of RGD (Registered Graphic Designers). Her role in RGD was to create programs that support both students and academic professionals in design. As such she created a Canada-wide Designathon, set up yearly academic awards of excellence and began an academic peer-reviewed journal. Professor van Kampen is also a contemporary feminist artist, using traditional creative practices such as needlework to deconstruct contemporary design methods and messages. 


Lena Phillips (she/her), based in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada), currently works at the intersection of philanthropy and equity, supporting grassroots and systems change work being led by and for Indigenous and Black communities. She has been the lead assistant for the DM2020 research project and instrumental in developing the Creative Practice as Protest workshop held at OCAD U. She brings a focus on exploring creative practice, placemaking and design justice for the project. Lena is also a researcher with Virtual Grounds (a project of Digital Justice Lab and Trinity Square video) where she is exploring digital justice and urban futures. She previously worked in the non-profit and international development sectors focusing on food security, arts and culture, and community development. Past projects include: youth-led, grassroots organizing for climate justice; facilitating new programs and partnerships as an Aga Khan Foundation Fellow in Uganda; and engaging as a participatory action researcher focused on housing/displacement in London post-2012 Olympics and on antieviction work in slums/informal settlements in sub-Saharan African cities. Her interests lie in applying African/Afro-centric, Southern and Indigenous epistemologies and urbanisms as a means to critically interrogate dominate Northern/Western theories of (urban) space. She has a BA from the University of Toronto and an MSc Urban Development Planning from The Bartlett, University College London.

To learn more about this research, please visit: https://www2.ocadu.ca/research/cgiraudy/project/design-manifesto-2020

This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

SSHRC Logo

Image of Youth participants working in groups as part of the Creative Practice as Protest Workshop held at OCAD U in January 202
Thursday, July 9, 2020 - 10:15am

Design ManifesT.O 2020

Recipients of 2018 OCAD University Research Seed Grant, Associate Professor Cheryl Giraudy and Assistant Professor Saskia van Kampen, Faculty of Design have just launched a two­-year research effort with the working title Design ManifesT.O 2020: creating new ideas for Toronto. The project has begun with an audit of past and ongoing proposals, movements, policies, and calls to action that evolve art, design and creative endeavours of place­making as part of transforming the city, including aspirations for greater equity, democratic reform, infrastructure, transit, amalgamation, and neighbourhood redevelopment.

The project launched with a public panel discussion as part of the 2019 DesignTO Festival at the Open Gallery, 49 McCaul. The panel of community­-based activists, writers, critics, and makers, moderated by Councillor Kristyn Wong­Tam, Toronto Centre Ward 13, shared their stories for grassroot endeavours and disruptive strategies for place­making and included Author Dave Meslin, Community organizer Sabina Ali, Manager, Community + Policy Connections Ajeev Bhatia, and Public Art Critic Sarah Ratzlaff. Research Assistants Christine Xia and Samantha Matters contributed significantly to efforts of planning, and research collection. The research team has begun planning the second forum in collaboration with potential sponsors, and aimed for Scarborough neighbourhoods, to gather/listen to citizen efforts for community-based creative placemaking.

In conjunction with faculty partners, early plans for a ‘Creative Practice as Protest Workshop’ with Colloqate.Org, an award winning community platform for racial, social, and cultural equity in city­making, are being discussed, potentially aligned with a student competition for new ideas for Toronto. Stories and information collected from all events, forums, workshops, as well as interviews, will form a rich database to explore and ideally manifest a creative artefact, be it video, book or toolkit for planning Toronto 2020 and beyond.

 

Photograph of Borough Posters installed in the windows of 49 McCaul.
Guest Panelists Dave Meslin, Ajeev Bhatia in discussion prior to event in front of Borough Posters
Photo of Project Launch with Panel Discussion and Open Mic at Open Gallery 49 McCaul St
Photo of Research Collaborators Saskia Van Kampen, Cheryl Giraudy and Bryan Lee Jr., co-founder of Colloqate.Org meeting
Monday, February 4, 2019 - 10:30am

Writing in Dangerous Times: Survival, Resistance, Joy

Saturday, October 28, 2017 - 9:00am to 5:00pm

This event is a collaboration between Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP), TIA House (University of Calgary), and OCAD University, Creative Writing, co-sponsored by the Writing and Learning Center and organized in conjunction with the CCWWP board meeting to take place Sunday, October 29th at OCADU.

The October 28th 2017 program is free and open to OCAD University students and faculty, students and faculty from across Turtle Island, CCWWP members, Toronto writers and the general public. Please write cblack@faculty.ocadu.ca to confirm your presence using the subject: Writing in Dangerous Times RSVP.

OCAD U is committed to providing an inclusive and barrier-free experience to students, faculty, staff, and visitors with accessibility needs. This event is fully wheelchair accessible. All panels will take place in OCADU’s Learning Zone, on the ground floor, room #110, 113 McCaul. The Learning Zone is a wheelchair accessible space with two accessible washrooms and no fixed seating. This is a mic’d event.

The Learning Zone is accessible through the McCaul or St. Patrick Street entrance at 122 St. Patrick St. Parking is available in the underground lot directly below the venue, with handicapped parking closest to the elevator at the McCaul Street entrance. The cost of parking is $15 daily maximum, $6 evening maximum.

Please contact 416-977-6000 extension 2205 or accessibility@ocadu.ca for information on the best barrier-free routes on campus, Wheel-Trans pick-up and drop-off points, locations of elevators and accessible washrooms, requests for ASL translators, or information in alternate formats.

https://www.ocadu.ca/services/odesi/accessibility.htm
https://www.ocadu.ca/services/Library/hours.htm

Venue & Address: 
OCAD U Learning Zone, 122 St. Patrick Street, Level 1 (also accessible from 113 McCaul Street)
Writing in Dangerous Times Poster

Industrial Design students designing for social change

Industrial Design students with sewing collective members
Sewing collective member shows fabric to students
Thursday, November 19, 2015 - 5:00am

The students have the concepts, the sewing collective has the skills. Second-year Industrial Design students are teaming up with a sewing collective run by women in Regent Park to create marketable products and a potential source of added income for the community.

The collaboration came about when assistant professor Ranee Lee met with Angela Draskovic, president of the Yonge Street Mission, to discuss how design for social innovation can fit in with Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy.

Lee learned about projects going on in Regent Park and found a way to integrate the sewing collective into her existing curriculum for the design course Identity Materialized, giving students an opportunity to engage in experiential learning.

Members of the collective welcomed the students to their workspace at a Gerrard St. community centre in November. They started the collective as a way to get together with other women and sew clothing and household goods.

The students are now taking what they learned from members of the collective and applying it to a soft goods project in class. This involves designing products that can be produced locally by the collective, developing a brand identity that reflects the revitalized Regent Park, conducting market research and creating advertising for the collective and its products.

In December, members of the collective will come to OCAD University to hear the students present their design ideas and, in turn, to give their own feedback and input.

Causing An Effect

Green poster with black text
Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 5:00am to Saturday, January 31, 2015 - 5:00am

Exhibition of Changemakers, Uncertainty, and Images of the Future. Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI) student research project by Kelly Kornet. 

Causing An Effect explores how people transform into changemakers, overcoming uncertainty to lead active lives towards a preferred future for themselves and their communities. 

Opening Night

​​Wednesday January 28, 6 to 9 p.m.

Exhibition Dates

Thursday January 29, ​10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

​Friday January 30, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

​Saturday January 31, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University Graduate Gallery 105 Richmond St.
Website: 
http://www.causinganeffect.com/
Green poster with black text