Interrogations + Provocations on Design: Reconsidering the Understanding + Realization of Quality in the Built Environment

[EN] Built environments are remarkably and increasingly complex, crossing over an array of scales and comprising a diversity of types.  City planning, urban design, architecture, landscape and interiors, constituting the range of Environmental Design professions, are challenged, at unforeseen levels, to address an expanding list of expectations, to juggle a heightened number of parameters, to meet rising expectations for sustainability, and to proffer greater health & wellness for our communities.  In other words, designing in our contemporary times is tough sledding that warrants unprecedented sensitivity, sensibility and responsibility.  Despite awareness that a reset is in order, the status quo perpetuates in part due to habits, in part due to politics, and in part due to indifference.  Change is tricky to realize, especially when momentum acts to continue the conventional.  The present paper explores and explains the unconventional principles underpinning a major intersectoral and interdisciplinary 5-year pan-Canadian project that aims to dramatically reconsider design.  Moving beyond superficial tweaking or modest adjustments, this precedent-setting comprehensive research questions societal views on design over four influential groups: namely, government, professionals, academics and citizens.  Fundamental to this approach is bringing all four sectors together to conduct research, to ask hard questions, to analyze designs, and to determine novel ways of seeing, thinking and acting that usher in real change.  The project considers not only existing plans and projects, but also investigates means of procurement that precede design actions.  The research encompasses 14 sites across the country, each examining different dimensions and subjects concerning quality in the built environment.  With a research network including over 120 individual contributors, the project leverages knowledge, funding and tactics to build a significant database available to players engaged in the design, development, construction and occupation of spaces and places across the nation.  Funding levels ($8.6 million overall and $2.5 million direct agency cash) permit research pursuits, and researcher interactions, atypical in Environmental Design studies.  Methods deployed in the partnership are diverse and productive, including most notably community roundtables, regular congress, diverse case studies, process & procurement analysis, and pilot or test studies.  At the core of the enterprise is a commitment to move beyond the typical, constricted and limiting ways in which our professions, and society more generally, defines quality in design.  Moving beyond reliance on form, materials and aesthetics, the pan-Canadian project delves into areas of environmental psychology, urban sociology, system science, public health, and so forth, in an effort to render and reform our grasp of design to better serve our citizens and our societies.  Transcending narrow views of ‘good’ design