Speaker

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Context 

Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre serves Northwestern Ontario’s diverse and changing population, including many Indigenous peoples and newcomers. With rising mental health needs, aging demographics, and systemic inequities, leaders questioned whether the hospital’s spaces reflected its commitments to its community, recognizing that physical environments shape trust and health outcomes.

Core Strategic Question

How can a regional health sciences centre transform its built environment into an active participant in healing, access, trust, and affirmation today and in future?

The Challenge

Healthcare spaces built for efficiency often neglect a holistic approach to wellbeing, which can reinforce mistrust. Our client needed a campus-wide assessment across cultural safety, inclusion, universal design, psychological safety, and community‑centred healing environments.

The Approach

Decanthropy conducted a holistic Physical Environment Audit grounded in participatory methodology. This included demographic and STEEPVL foresight analysis, pre-audit surveys using Causal Layered Analysis and Three Horizons workshops, structured spatial walkthroughs, scenario engagement and benchmarking against leading global healthcare facilities.

The Outcomes

The work culminated in a Hospital Design Prioritization Framework integrating feasibility, desirability, viability, and fairness to guide capital planning decisions. Short, Mid and Long-term initiatives where identity with a decision-making framework aligned to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre core values

Key Insight(s)

• Space shapes experience. When intentionally designed, hospital environments become infrastructure for dignity, reconciliation, and relational healing.

Context

Community Living Toronto envisioned Lawson as more than housing. It aimed to create an inclusive, accessible community in Scarborough where everyone belongs and is valued. Partnering with developers and stakeholders, the project redefined community living, using design to challenge stigma and visibly affirm people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Core Strategic Question

How might a mixed-use community development eliminate social stigma and create visible, lived belonging for people often excluded from mainstream housing and public life? 

The Challenge

The problem extended beyond affordability. Historic stigma, narrow definitions of value, and transactional design processes risked serving real needs. 

Traditional housing models often separate rather than integrate, and high-rise environments can increase isolation without intentional social design, aligning financial viability, affordability, accessibility, and high-support needs, community integration, to build interest-holder trust and avoid delivering just compliant housing. 

Our Approach

Decanthropy led a comprehensive visioning and inclusive design process grounded in a whole person, whole process methodology. Project visioning included site plan and application input, environmental design concepts, consultant collaboration, stakeholder engagement and insights analysis, and facilitation of co-creation and participatory community engagement. The work integrated inclusive design pillars and core environmental strategies, supported by clear implementation and evaluation frameworks. This was life-centred environmental design beyond compliance. 

The Outcomes

 A clear vision, partner-ready design brief, communications and design toolkit, structured decision-making framework, measurable inclusive design strategy, and guiding environmental design systems for programming, placemaking and implementation. 

Key Insight

Community care must be intentionally designed into movement, moments of exchange, visibility, service delivery, and everyday spatial experiences to meet present and future needs.

Decanthropy supported The Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA) an independent, non-profit accrediting organization navigate uncertainties by modeling future opportunities through resilient, innovative, and adaptive strategies. Decanthropy engaged leadership teams with strategic planning tools to establish long-term viability of their enterprise and stakeholders. The plan is bold, we are also crafting content to tell a story as unique as the organization itself.  

Food waste and insecurity encompass an enormous scope of several issues, globally. This includes, but is not limited to food production, commercialization, societal inequities, human greed or poor environment stewardship. The Crisis of Care insights represents an early stage investigation to finding possible opportunities and unmet needs at the intersection of the “Last-mile” for food waste within the Hotel Industry in Barbados and the food insecurity of its ageing population over 65 years old. 

Durham College retained Decanthropy to reimagine interior decoration and design education for our future world. The exciting 2-Year Program project launches in FALL 2025 and will seek to restate the value of design within an established educational framework to drive change and innovation.