We Count Evaluates Toronto’s Quayside Master Innovation and Development Plan
Project We Count evaluated the Master Innovation and Development Plan for Toronto’s Quayside from the perspective of persons in Toronto who have difficulty with or are excluded by the current urban plan.
This evaluation focuses on inclusion and accessibility concerns developed from stories written by diverse individuals. Individuals at the edges of our communities are often the most vulnerable to risks and design failures when we re-design spaces, services and policies. Individuals that have difficulty using or can’t use our current designs, also have the most compelling uses of new systems. It is incumbent on an inclusive society to think about the full spectrum of needs. If time and resources constrain the needs to be considered, considering previously excluded voices will garner the greatest innovation and sustainability. Individuals that experience our designs from the edges are valuable evaluators; they provide unexplored perspectives for surfacing fail points. For this reason, we have employed a bottom-up evaluation that focuses on the experience of individuals at the edges of our current community designs in evaluating the Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP). Our approach to the evaluation is a co-design approach that uses narrative analysis to generate questions with which we can evaluate the MDIP.