Centering Hope, Action and Change for National Indigenous History Month at the Innovation Hub
Written by Terri-Lynn Langdon, Editor and Writer
June is National Indigenous History Month and The Innovation Hub wishes to celebrate this month and Day (June 21st) by celebrating the lives of Indigenous communities and acknowledging the richness and diversity of Indigenous knowledge, histories, and world views.1
In recent years, our work with Indigenous Student Services (also known as First Nations House) has focused on engaging with spaces, services, and needs for Indigenous students on campus. Through these projects, we collaborated these spaces from 2018-2019 to foster spheres of community on campus. The Innovation Hub then explored the core needs of services that are needed on campus for Indigenous students to feel supported and engaged throughout their respective studies. It’s through these integral community partnerships and our design thinking processes and resources that we continually work to address realities that Indigenous lives, spaces, and communities face in a Canadian context (and beyond).
What’s Happening June 29-July 3 on Stories from a Distance
What’s Happening June 22-26 on Stories from a Distance
#DisplayYourPride 2020: Celebrating Pride and Intersectionality at the Innovation Hub
Written by Terri-Lynn Langdon and Kaitlyn Corlett
Happy Pride Month, 2020! From all of us at the Innovation Hub, let’s celebrate love and affirmation for everybody. This is especially important in a time where many of us may feel disconnected from our communities, spaces, and activities that ground us for celebrating this important time of year. At the Innovation Hub, we often celebrate #DisplayYourPride in a collaborative activity to connect with one another and express how we are celebrating. Since we can’t connect in-person this year, we are celebrating by acknowledging the important history of Pride and inviting readers to think about how to celebrate in a commitment to anti-racism and intersectionality. We are centering the lives of Black LGBTQ2SIA+1 folx2, who continue to be catalysts for significant change in the LGBTQ2SIA+ movement.
A Physical Space for Student Well-being
Editor’s Note: In light of COVID-19 and social distancing, we would like to note that the insights expressed in this post were developed prior to the COVID-19 crisis. We acknowledge that imagining student spaces physically looks very different at this time, and we hope that some of these insights provide value to virtual spaces for students.
Students often spend long hours on campus. Throughout the day, they move around to accommodate their busy schedules. Classes eat up big chunks of time, but in the spaces between, students look for comfortable places to relax or be productive. They find many formal study spaces , but are those the only places they seek?
To provide more student-friendly spaces on campus, the Innovation Hub partnered with the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) for the Fall-Winter 2019/2020 term to redesign the Benson Pool Gallery. We wanted to turn the Gallery into an accessible student space. Moreover, we wanted to ensure it was truly student friendly. Thus, we interviewed other students about what they need in community spaces. Our ultimate goal was to answer the question: “How can the Benson Pool Gallery be redesigned to offer an innovative multi-use community space for students?”
The Redefining Traditional Backstory: How Design Thinkers Created a Virtual Community of Student Parents and Supporters During COVID-19
By Celeste Pang, Sauliha Alli, Sanja Ivanov and Heather Watts
Design thinkers at the Innovation Hub share the backstory of the Redefining Traditional virtual community of student parents and their supporters.
This week on Stories from a Distance…
In Solidarity with Black Lives: Centering Black Communities and Committing to Anti-Racism in our Lives
By Terri-Lynn Langdon, Editor and Writer
Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.
– Maya Angelou
At the Innovation Hub we honor our commitment to design with and for students. This work intersects with a scope of communities, faculties, and voices to ensure that we can co-create a university that works for all. Recently the University of Toronto has addressed a commitment to anti-black racism in solidarity with Black lives, communities, and spaces. Through conversations, protests, and movements we are experiencing a critical moment in time to end racialized violence. This is a centuries-long movement that must be joined, loved, and actively acknowledged.
In these conversations we have also recognized that it’s important to name racism and support anti-black racist efforts. Compounded by the reality of COVID-19, many Black communities are disproportionately impacted by racism in education, health care, and law enforcement. These experiences are present in many spaces we are a part of – in Canada and beyond. We must continue to acknowledge and address by resisting these types of discrimination in the foundations of the work we do.
Imagined Worlds
How Imagination Drives Innovation
By Darren Clift, Writer
It’s easy to exercise creativity during childhood, when imaginations are unrestrained. But as we grow up, we learn to leash our imaginations, to criticize our own creativity. The open parks of childhood become the closed spaces of our grown-up selves.
Design thinking seeks to re-liberate our creativity, but the forces and learned behaviours pushing against it are strong. To see how design leadership can nurture fresh ideas, I spoke to Gabriele Simmons, a Senior Project Assistant at the Innovation Hub.