Understanding the Community: Flipping the Orthodox
Class 2 of Munk+Evergreen began with a tour of the Evergreen Brick Works grounds. Our professor Jo Flatt explained the many quirks and areas of the site including where the well-known farmer’s market takes place, a children’s playground, and a beautiful lookout hill that many climb for the city views.
We then got to meet Isaac Crosby, head of the Urban Agriculture Garden at Evergreen Brick Works. As we stood in Isaac’s garden, he explained the purpose of the space, the importance of listening to the community, and what we can do to impact policy at a grassroots (literally) level. One of the greatest takeaways I had from meeting Isaac was if you want to really engage with a community, meet them where they are, physically and figuratively. If you wanted to hear their voices, then actually be quiet and listen. And sometimes we will need to take off our government hat and just be human. That’s one thing we all have in common, so be human and listen to one another. When the time comes to put your hat back on you’ll likely see things more differently and clear.
The theme of our class this week was “Understanding the Community: What do they want?”, a concept that Isaac really drove home for me.
Keeping in theme with this week’s topic, we got to hear from Zahra Ebrahim, a human-centred designer and consultant. Zahra spoke candidly about what human-centred design (HDC) is, defining it as a process where you see people, listen to people, and support them. To do so, we must build trust. HDC presents an opportunity to be creative, innovative, and as Zahra calls it “flipping the orthodox”. Too often we remain complicit to the norms of policy or product development. We need to include a greater experience of the end-users to create the most effective policies and services. That’s not to say we should omit quantitative data, it just means we should use a holistic breath of information including the qualitative piece that often holds the most nuance. In HCD, we have to find the nuance and bring people along through co-creation and collaboration.
When I think of collaboration I think of many different types of groups, organizations, and stakeholders but I never thought of children, until this week. The latter half of our class was spent chatting with students at Lord Landsdowne Junior Public School about their playground revitalization project. These students blew my mind. They used words like ‘stakeholder’, ‘risk simulation’ and ‘redesign’. The playground revitalization project is in partnership with Evergreen Brick Works and has a budget of $1 million thanks to a Toronto developer. Students are engaged in all stages of the project right from the start. They surveyed other students, facilitated classroom discussion, and collaborated with students from the neighbouring school to design the most epic playground. Listening to the students describe their work taught me to rethink what I consider to be a stakeholder, a community and a collaborative project.
All in all, class 2 brought forth three distinct ways of understanding the community.
- Be quiet, listen, and meet people where they are.
- To understand the community we must watch and observe them, identify their pain points and build trust.
- Sometimes we just have to hand over the power, even if that means we hand it over to kids. As one student said, “we have fresher minds than adults”, and I think she may be onto something valuable here!
