On June 1, Design Salon TO and Toronto Design Offsite hosted the fourth and final edition of their series of panel discussions, Exporting Toronto Design, looking at strategies to increase awareness of local designers and makers.
The discussion kicked off with a recap of the previous three sessions, the first of which was held in January of 2015 and some of the insights gathered, distilled down into three proposed tactics: A Design Council to take on activities like coordinating presence at international tradeshows, curating social media channels, and building an online database for Canadian design; a YouTube Channel putting designers and makers front and centre to emphasize the value of design to a broader community and address issues of limited exposure and the high cost of advertising; and a Design Hub that would combine a digital and physical shop for Toronto-designed goods with affordable access to space, classes and training.
The floor was then opened up to panelists including, Jeremy Vandermej of the Offsite Festival, Davide Tonizzo representing Design Industry Advisory Committee, Justin Leclair of Distl., Umbra’s Paul Rowan, Laura Stein of Bruce Mau Design, Canadian Design Resource and Motherbrand’s founder Todd Falkowsky, and Design Salon TO founder Lori Harrison, to reflect on the strengths and challenges of the proposed ideas.
Conversations ranged from the role of government funding for design, to Drake’s success in branding the city “The Six”, to what gaps in skills might need to be addressed to better empower the design community to take action, and what exactly Toronto’s design identity is. This last topic in particular always seems a difficult subject to pin down. Toronto is the nation’s economic engine with more designers per capita than any other area in the country. The city is incredibly culturally diverse, and at the same time perceived as being largely conservative, raising other questions: How might we incorporate diversity into a sense of unified geographic brand? And how might we create resilient infrastructure to effectively leverage the city’s creative capital?
Some of the proposed ideas – as a couple of the presenters pointed out – have been implemented in the past: Canada did, at one point, have a National Design Council formed on the recommendation of Donald Buchanan after the establishment of the Industrial Design Act of 1961, as a policy and promotional body, but after authoring around 20 publications, funding was later cut and the council was disbanded in 1985. The Design Exchange which opened it’s doors in 1994 was established by a group of citizens concerned by the lack of support for design by government and cultural institutions has played the role of the proposed “design hub”, but while the DX continues to host design-focused talks and exhibitions, in recent years the mandate has been shifted to focus on the institution’s more public-facing role as a museum, rather than on programming targeted specifically at the local design community.
One way the ideas developed through the Exporting Toronto Design events differ from models that have been implemented in the past, is an emphasis on integration of digital platforms – which certainly make it easier for an international audience to access information about Canadian design than ever before, and substantially reduces the cost of reaching out to these audiences. Falkowsky mentioned that around 80% of traffic to Canadian Design Resource is international, and here at Houseporn that number’s around 36%, which still demonstrates significant interest in Canadian design from outside of Canada. So it stands to reason that there’s an appetite for what Canadian and Torontonian designers have to offer.
Finding ways to transform this interest into economic impact, however, is no simple task, but it was heartening to see a room filled with people passionate about taking on this challenge, many of whom, not only on the panel but in the audience, have played and continue to play significant roles in Toronto’s design community. And certainly with the increasing variety of tools and new business models we now have at our fingertips, if dialogues like this continue, it’s a challenge we can find ways to address.
To find out more read Toronto Design Offsite’s recap of all of the Exporting Toronto Design events.
All photographs by Shoshauna Simmons courtesy of Toronto Design Offsite
This article was written by Miranda Corcoran, a designer and creative strategist based in Toronto.
