WiSED Information

WiSED is a design initiative based in Toronto. We run workshops that look at how everyday things are made, and the decisions behind them that usually go unnoticed. It started with a simple observation. Most of us work inside systems we did not design and cannot fully see, and we make decisions every day that shape what other people live with. Designers, engineers, planners, and anyone whose work ends up in the built world. The gap between what we intend and what actually gets built is where most of the interesting questions sit. What happens in a session: We start with something ordinary. A receipt, a piece of packaging, an object someone brought with them. We trace it back through the choices that produced it and ask who those choices served. Then people make something. Not a plan or a recommendation, but an object or a drawing, built by hand in the room, in response to what they just noticed. Where this is going: WiSED is early. We have run a handful of sessions so far, including with Toronto Public Library and during Toronto Climate Week, and each one has changed how we run the next. We are not working from a finished method. The workshops are a way of finding out what actually shifts how people think, and what only looks like it does. The people who come are part of that. What they build, what they push back on, and what falls flat all feed into what comes next. Who it is for: People whose work puts decisions into the world that others have to live with, and who would rather examine that than take it for granted.