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DoUC welcomes the chance to explore ideas, ask questions, and solve problems with new clients and collaborators.

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CONTACT

DoUC

Toronto CA
Copenhagen DK

info@wearedouc.com

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We are designers driven by curiosity, information and the human experience.

Welcome to Department of Unusual Certainties

DoUC is a research and design company driven by curiosity, information, and the human experience. Our team of design strategists with interdisciplinary backgrounds build individualized solutions for organizations seeking to strengthen their strategy, engagement, or to revitalize existing processes. DoUC excels at collaborating with clients, using strategies that can extract meaningful insights to develop work that better connects to and engages with internal and external audiences. We have experience working within a broad range of collaborative partnerships, budgets, and contexts to create with our clients.

We describe the wide-ranging and unique processes we develop as Structured Explorations: we make the structure and you do the exploring.

Using both familiar and unconventional methods—including workshops, experience and journey mapping, question exercises, prototyping, timelining, and games—Structured Explorations are built to suit your organization’s knowledge, needs and skills, and to deliver results.

What is a Structured Exploration?
We create processes and tools for our clients and partners that ask questions, gather and analyze information, generate insight, devise strategies, prototype ideas, and lead to outcomes rooted in your organization’s vision and values.

Our explorations aim to first identify organizational or community values through workshops and engagement. This ensures project outcomes are closely tied to your core mission, and better enables our clients to create or clarify their vision and desired outcomes through our proven processes of understanding, analyzing, and creating.

Some examples of past Structured Explorations have included community engagements, experience design & mapping, workshop facilitation, or prototyping and concept realization.

Past clients

Inuit Art Foundation
Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA)
ActionAid Denmark
Hxouse Foundation
Dansk Arkitektur Center
Town of Georgina
Workers Arts and Heritage Centre
Friends of the Greenbelt
Art Gallery of Ontario
Cirque du Soliel
Harbourfront Centre
Venice Biennale

City of Experiences

As we enter the 21st century, the experience of life in the contemporary has surpassed the classic development models of the 20th century. We are living in the 50/50 (some might say 70/30), a fluid presence between the virtual and physical worlds. This is shaping alternative modes for how we exist, providing us with the potential to manage and create multiple realities and stories which influence how we want to be seen and understood. But how do we in turn adapt and understand ideologies, structures and systems in this new way of living, modifying the definition of cities to encompass the experiences of the invisible cities that extend beyond physical infrastructure?

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twenty seventeen.

A year in review. This year the studio has grown up. We incorporated, we moved into our own space, and we took the time to define what we do and why we do it. We’ve had some good days, met some great people, and shared some choice thoughts on the value of neon post-its.

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Interpretation in a world of interpretations

Often, misinterpretation in the present affects our ability to understand the importance of objects and actions in the past. It is this confusion that skews our concept of the vernacular through a projection of current values.

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Designing Privacy

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting a panel in collaboration with Pantopicon for the Toronto Design Offsite that posed the question “how can we use design to address privacy in today’s context?”

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Vernacular

Vernacular, broadly speaking, refers to things pertaining to the everyday—that which is made by, spoken, used or performed by the average person rather than experts. Vernacular helps us as humans to define the character of specific moments in time, allowing for discussion and debate.

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Pioneering Green Communities

The past two years of work with ReWilding and many of the communities around Lake Simcoe has been a huge opportunity for growth at DoUC. We’ve had the chance to contribute to exciting projects and activities, meet so many amazing people and most importantly, see the impact our designs have had on the community. These experiences have been rewarding for us in many ways, but it’s always nice (and humbling!) to receive some outside recognition.

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On Community Engagement

Recent projects have given DoUC the opportunity to reflect on the tools and processes we use to design community engagement activities. It’s a constant process of adjustment through listening, sharing, guiding, understanding and designing that can lead to the most imaginative and relevant results.

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Spring Cleaning

In 2016 spring / summer, DoUC is looking forward to the construction of three new permanent sites with our client ReWilding Lake Simcoe.

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Twenty Sixteen.

DoUC are designers, we want to design everything….except our website, which you may have noticed was expertly neglected over the past few years. Long overdue, we finally have a new digital home for the studio.

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