“Incubation is the next Innovation.”  
Ryan Jacoby, co-leader, IDEO New York speaks about how companies will learn to develop, design, pilot and incubate new businesses and new ideas due to the changing economic landscape and the lean approaches to building businesses. Organizations will become more multidisciplinary rather than specialized. This I wholeheartedly agree with. People in their 20s and 30s are no longer happy with simply having one degree or designation (I am a prime example of that!). With accountants becoming designers, engineers with MBAs and psychiatrists becoming chefs, mutli-talented, multi-faceted people building interdisciplinary organizations. The key is to figure out how these unique organizations can still work together. At archiTEXT, we are doing a pretty good job of figuring that out for ourselves. Over the past year, we have developed a new motto – What can we do together that we can’t do alone? Interdisciplinary or not, we all still need to work together.

“Design Doing, not just Design Thinking.”
I could not agree more with this statement made by Robert Fabricant, vice-president, creative at frog. We’ve done a lot of reading and research into creativity and design thinking over the past year. Design thinking is a great way to bridge the gap between the corporate world and the design world as it puts design into corporate lingo. However, definitions and lingo aside, nothing will progress if nothing is done. Beyond design thinking is design doing. I see the creation of dynamic user experiences as the next step to design thinking – it translates the talk into the walk. At archiTEXT, that is what we have discovered organizations are really needing and I see that as the trend for 2012.

“Social Communication = Design.”
As Dan Formosa, co-founder of Smart Design, put it, design is synonymous with communication and communication affects behaviour. That being the case, this means that design also affects behaviour. Any good designer can tell you that that is true. Whether it is architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, any design, good and bad design can affect behaviour. And with the explosion of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, good and bad design travels at the speed of light – or at the very least, the speed of your local internet connection.

“Creativity as a Tool.”
With the economic climate in such uncertainty and the environmental climate in such turmoil, organizations are having to adapt and run on lean capital. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow and what works tomorrow will not necessarily work the next day. Yes, innovation and development is absolutely necessary to the survival of many organizations but more intrinsic to innovation is the idea that creativity can be a tool in an organization’s arsenal. Innovation often refers to large-scale processes and products, to the refinement of existing processes and products in order to solve a problem. Creativity can be harnessed by individuals within an organization and often refer to the creation of something unique and new. It is this creation of something new and unique that organizations should truly value and not just innovation itself (though obviously valuable).

“Participatory Design.”
Perhaps it is due to our work in the social innovation and social entrepreneurship sector but it seems to me that organizations are no longer simply seeking solutions from their designers but are looking towards their customers, their members, their community for the solution. Designers and other solution architects are simply the vehicle to ensuring that the execution is carried flawlessly. The official birth of the Centre for City Ecology in Toronto this past year seems to be a prime example of this. Through their various events and forums, they’ve worked with designers, architects, communities and residents to come up with urban solutions. These solutions could simply be provided by the designers and architects but at the end of the day, they are not the ones that would benefit or lose from the solutions, the communities are. Our East Scarborough Storefront project is of course my greatest example of this. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you are looking for a quick project solution, participatory design is not for you. Participatory design is all about process and this process is quite long. However, the rewards are that much greater. I am very happy to see a growth in participatory design and anticipate further growth in this area in 2012.

THE WORLD OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER

From Academy-Award winning Director Robert Snyder, this 1974 classic stars Bucky himself as he describes his life philosophy and pioneering body of work.  Featuring beautiful vintage footage of everything from his earliest inventions to the Expo 67 geodesic dome.

Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Time: 7:00pm

Location: Design Exchange, 234 Bay Street, Patty Watt Room (3rd Floor)

Admission: $10 early bird admission or $15 at the door

Snacks and drinks are available for purchase (bake sale proceeds to a local charity)

RSVP: rebecca@architextinc.com or buy tickets at www.architextfilmwastefood.eventbrite.com

This week’s theme will be on cool buildings that I love. Enjoy!

 Native Child in Toronto (via ArchDaily)

 Picard Nursery in Paris (via ArchDaily)

 St. Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo (via ArchDaily)

 WoZoCo in The Netherlands (via ArchDaily)

I had a really fun time coming up with the fortunes that went into them. Some of them were inspiring – “The impossible is often the untried” or “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected”. Some of them were more humourous – “Borrow money from a pessimist. They don’t expect it back” or “Always drink upstream from the herd”. I also included some PG-rated fortunes as I wanted to make enough to bring to our Community.Design.Initiative session with the youth the day after.

I searched on the inter-web for fortune cookie recipes. They all generally seemed the same so I adapted a few recipes together to create my own.

1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
8 large egg whites (I used the egg white cartons so that I didn’t have to throw out so many egg yolks)
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup 1% milk
2 tsp almond extract
parchment paper, cookie sheet

Melt the butter and combine all of the ingredients with a beater. I say 1/4 cup of milk but I think it will depend on the actual combination of ingredients. Basically, the batter needs to be slightly running and not too goopy. This is important because the first dozen cookies I made were failures. They tasted good but were too thick, too eggy and not at all pliable.

Now comes the tricky part. Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees celsius. Line the cookie sheet with parchment paper. Place a tablespoon of the batter on the sheet and spread it out into a round circle of about 5 inches. It can be smaller or larger but the key is the thickness of the cookie. It should be quite thin, about 1/8 inch, otherwise, it will be too hard to fold. If you are doing this by yourself, only put 2 cookies on each tray as you won’t be able to move fast enough. And warning, you will likely scorn your fingertips as you work. Bake the cookies for about 7 minutes, until you see the edges turn golden brown. While you are waiting, get your fortunes ready. They will need to be wrapped into the cookie, otherwise, it is much trickier trying to loop them in afterwards.

Once the cookies come out, you have about 10 seconds to move before the cookies become too difficult to shape. Place the fortune in the centre of the cookie and fold the cookie in half, pressing in the centre. Then fold the cookie in half again by putting your thumb and index finger into each end and connecting them. You will end up with a butterfly-like shape. With the golden edges and the white centres, these cookies actually end up looking quite pretty.

Once I got into the rhythm of how to make the cookies, they were quite easy and fun to make. I just won’t mention that I might have burned a portion of my fingerprint. Enjoy!

Well, these questions are being addressed in our monthly POP UP CREATIVITY workshops. Check out our first one coming up at the end of the month! To register, go to www.architextpopup.eventbrite.com.

We sat in the Lobby Bar, amidst tables of grandmothers and mothers with babies. High tea comes with a selection of finger sandwiches, scones and desserts, as well as your choice of a potted tea.  It is all presented on a lovely three-tiered tray, exactly what one would expect at High Tea. All for the High Tea price of $38 per person.

The sandwich selection we had included roasted chicken breast on a mini brioche, smoked salmon and cream cheese on rye, an open faced portabella mushroom and havarti on focaccia, triple decker ham and cheddar on white and apple and aged cheddar with chutney on sourdough. While the sandwiches were not bad, they were not what I would have expected from the Four Seasons. The roasted chicken breast was a bit dry and need a touch of salt though the mini brioche was nice and the size was very cute. The apple and aged cheddar could have been an interesting combination but did not leave much of an impression again, due to lack of salt. The rye on the smoked salmon was dry and stale. The ham and cheddar is a staple on the High Tea sandwich platter but this version just reminded me of my childhood lunch box sandwiches. The best of the sandwiches was the portabella mushroom which was quite flavourful and juicy and nicely complemented by the havarti cheese on top. That was the favourite of the table.

The pastries included a walnut bread, a chocolate tart, almond shortbread triangles and ginger-banana bread. The chocolate tart was rich with a flaky crust. The almond shortbread was flaky but did not have the rich buttery taste expected from a shortbread. The walnut bread was nice though a tad on the dry side. It needed the small spread of butter that I put on it. The best of the bunch was definitely the ginger-banana bread as it had a nice nutty flavour and was moist and slightly chewy.

Part of the ritual of High Tea was to tackle the tea selection, which is quite plentiful. From the traditional oolong, green and chai to the herbals such as lychee, peppermint and mountain berry to the specialty flowering teas, it was like being presented with a wine bible in a fine restaurant. I ordered the organic green tea, which was perfect for my Sunday afternoon recovery from a late Saturday night. My girlfriends had ordered the Nutcracker and the Chai. All teas came in individual tea pots and were quite satisfactory.

However, the Bite of the Afternoon came from the simply delicious and flaky scones, combined with the whipped butter and sweet and tart lemon curd. The scones were everything you would expect from a good scone – buttery, light, flaky, sweet. The whipped butter combined with the perfect tanginess of the lemon curd made this the bite of the afternoon.

All in all, I enjoyed my High Tea experience. Did the Four Seasons live up to its expectations for High Tea, the jury’s still out on that.

I began by taking a quite look online at what other tree houses looked like and came across these pretty designs.

From here, the three of us each came up with our own ideas for a Tree House Studio. Here they are:

My first plan

My second plan

Keegan’s Plan

Zahra’s plan

We then started to layer each of the plans on top of each other to create the Ultimate Tree House. Progress to follow in later posts. It was such a great afternoon in the studio – this is why I love my job!!