Industrial Design students enhance the Toronto living experience

http://www.ocad.ca/students/articles_campus_life/20090429_toronto_unbound.htm

In June of 2008, OCAD’s third-year Industrial Design students had the opportunity to participate in Toronto Unbound, an exhibition featuring unique design solutions meant to enhance Toronto neighbourhoods. The hugely successful exhibit took place at XPACE, a student-run exhibit space located in the Queen West neighourhood, and drew a crowd of close to 300 on opening night.

Toronto Unbound represented the culmination of an immense amount of work and an incredibly engaging partnership between OCAD, the City of Toronto, and OpenCity Projects — a group of writers, filmmakers, strategists and designers dedicated to enhancing the city living experience. This year, five of the solutions proposed by students are being implemented throughout Toronto.

The exhibition followed a full-semester project involving students enrolled in ID Studio 4: Design for Flow Space, which is a core course offered to Industrial Design students at OCAD. The course asks students to focus on experience design in their projects, a practice that involves improving the quality of the user experience. A partnership between OpenCity Projects and the City of Toronto was initiated prior to start of the course to help students understand the value of stakeholder insight and how it informs design. As Faculty of Design Professor Job Rutgers explains, “I organize the course each year together with a partner organization in order to provide a real-world context for students, making sure that they gain an in-depth understanding and immersion in user-experience research and concept testing. As this is the last core studio course they’ll take before they embark on thesis, it’s important to engage them in a full-semester project.”

The mandate of OpenCity Projects is to enhance the Toronto living experience. With this as their core inspiration, students working on the project proposed innovative solutions that ranged from creating safer neighbourhoods to integrating new residents into the community. They also immersed themselves in specific neighbourhoods as part of the lab, discovering residents’ insights, identifying challenges and opportunities, and generating design solutions that extended beyond the physical to address peoples’ needs. Of the 80 design solutions created, the most compelling 22 were chosen for the exhibition. A special jury representing all partners selected the top 5 projects to be implemented by the City of Toronto over the next year.

“I applaud the efforts of OCAD students to craft unique designs for our streets and neighbourhoods,” said Mayor David Miller about Toronto Unbound in 2008. “By engaging Torontonians, the designers have responded to the needs expressed by local residents while revealing something new about familiar public spaces. This partnership between OCAD, OpenCity Projects and the City is helping make Toronto a truly livable city.”

Says Vincent Monastero, whose project Red Carpet is soon to be implemented in Parkdale and West Queen West, “We studied the neighbourhood for four months to choose an idea that would be the best fit. We didn’t want it to exist at a remove from the people who live there.” Monastero’s project intends to help dismantle what he perceives to be the physical, spatial, cultural, social and economic division between these neighbourhoods, which are separated by the overhead railway bridge that spans the intersection of Dufferin and Queen streets. His proposed solution comprises a red carpet in the shape of meandering arrows, which guide people in and out of the streetcar at the stop in front of the Gladstone Hotel. “This particular stop was chosen,” says Monastero, “because it has the most traffic and is the most visible. The project is meant to bring attention to your arrival into the neighbourhood and then your departure out of it.” Residents have praised the proposal for to the way it will serve, potentially, as an area landmark, and the way it will keep people from getting lost when they visit.

This year, OCAD’s Industrial Design students are participating in a similar project in partnership with OpenCity Projects and Luminato. “Icebreakers” — the theme for the 2009 project — focuses on communication and its ability to bring people together and strengthen communities. The students are asked to design solutions, objects, spaces, signage or rituals that serve as interfaces connecting people. The top design solutions will be exhibited at Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place) for one day as part of the Luminato festival, and at XPACE for 10 days.

“For students participating in this project, it is first and foremost a deep immersion in user-experience research methods,” says Rutgers. “The course opens new opportunities for designers. It also provides students with the tools and process to identify and develop these opportunities.”

By Veronika Lukacs, third-year Criticism & Curatorial Practice student at OCAD.

http://www.ocad.ca/students/articles_campus_life/20090429_toronto_unbound.htm