How might we create housing opportunities where seniors and people of all ages can thrive by rethinking the business of development as a vehicle for community stewardship and belonging?
The Lab
Enabling Citizen-Led Housing: New Models for Seniors’ Housing Design and Development was an initiative funded by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) through the National Housing Strategy’s Solutions Lab program. The Lab was led by SHS Consulting, in partnership with Toronto Council on Aging, Collaborative Aging, and SvN Architects + Planners.
The Lab brought seniors, housing developers, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders together to co-create more collaborative planning and development processes to enable seniors to influence their housing in meaningful ways.
With the help of Lab participants, our design challenge was framed as:
How might we create housing opportunities where seniors and people of all ages can thrive, by rethinking the business of development as a vehicle for community stewardship and belonging?
Lab Outcomes and Final Report
Through the co-design process, we converged on two solutions that would enable seniors and other community members to meaningfully contribute to the creation of new age-friendly housing options, innovating on current supplier-led models of housing development.
Go to our Solutions page to read more and view the final report.
Our Process
This Lab followed a co-design process, using a creative and inclusive approach to imagine new housing possibilities for seniors. This innovation process followed four phases of activity:
Discovery
Learning from the perspectives of seniors and developers to identify new opportunities for creating and expanding inclusive, age-friendly housing
Development
Coming together to generate and refine a set of new ideas and potential approaches to address our Lab’s key desired outcomes
Prototype
Prioritizing the most promising approaches and strategies to bring to life, testing with the community, and further refining solutions
Roadmap
Creating a plan for implementation and uptake of new tools, approaches, and strategies in the real world
Engagement Principles
The Lab is participatory: prioritizing collaborative work and dialogue, through the use of engaging workshops, interviews, and at-home activities to illicit new and innovative insights
The Lab takes a human-centred approach, bringing the people with whom we’re designing to the forefront of the process—involving our seniors’ design team, advisors, and external experts over the course of the entire Lab
The Lab acknowledges that everyone is an expert in their own domain and brings value through their life experiences and contributions to the design process
The Lab embraces ambiguity by withholding the urge to quickly get to “the answer” and allowing new avenues to emerge from the Lab process