In 2020, the Design Industry Advisory Committee (DIAC) developed a Framework to explore critical impacts of design. These impacts apply to all types of projects across all of the design disciplines. DIAC decided to demonstrate these impacts by focusing on design interventions in Placemaking. Successful Placemaking involves a focus on economic prosperity, social wellbeing and environmental sustainability – the fundamental principles of all good design. DIAC wanted to understand how specific design interventions create positive impacts that can be assessed and measured and how these impacts can be applied to other Placemaking projects.

Daan Roosegaarde is a Rotterdam-based designer and innovator whose work exists at the intersection of art, science and design. His installations in the public realm often have an environmental theme. In 2019 Roosegaarde started work on a technical design to sanitize the air in public spaces. With the start of the pandemic the development of the project, called Urban Sun, took on a new urgency.

As soon as the pandemic hit last year, industrial designer Kevin Mar was on a video call with a number of his colleagues, a braintrust of people who wanted to help. They considered developing a locally-made ventilator but they quickly realized that designing this complex medical device would need to involve close collaboration with health care and engineering professionals. This project was just too complex to take on at the time.

DIAC’s Design Response to COVID-19 Call for Projects attracted a wide variety of submissions from designers of all disciplines. As we begin to share these projects, here are a number of Best Practices emerging from the submissions we have received so far. We will be exploring specific benefits of early involvement of designers in each of the projects we post.

Sometimes we have to envision a big idea to make the emotional connection with people’s wants and needs. That was the starting point for Calgary-based interior designer Burt Boucock’s Coronavirus Recovery Suite. Boucock imagined the ideal environment for victims of the Coronavirus to recovery once they were out of immediate medical danger. He describes his concept as “self-sterilization environment meets fully-contained recovery suite.”