Interrogations + Provocations on Design: Reconsidering the Understanding + Realization of Quality in the Built Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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, the research seeks consciousness of lived experience, respect of community diversity, promotion of elevated accessibility, inclusion of Indigeneity, and acceptance that the ways we design have serious consequences for our quality of life. The paper concludes with a discussion of the outcomes, implications and impacts of the research, including work executed to date over the opening phase, as well as anticipated efforts targeting policy reform, regulatory revision, and political moves focused on heightened quality in Canada’s built environment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".