InWithForward History
A summary of our key partners, projects, and hypotheses, 2014-2020.
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Thick Data Primer
Thick data is human-scale data. It is collected from small samples in everyday contexts, making visible the motivations, values, preferences, perceptions, and environments of people often left out of public consultations or large-scale datasets.
Speculative Stories of The Soulful City
Speculative Stories of The Soulful City shares six provocations for a flourishing Edmonton. These six provocations visualize the kinds of interactions that might exist in a city that fosters wellbeing as healing and connection for all.
Soulful City
Soulful City brings together stories from the streets, with aggregated analysis, historical data, and social science literature to explore with what it means to live well. Situated in Edmonton, Soulful City surfaces themes that transcend time and place.
The Questions of The Ages: Stories, number, insights on ageing across Canada
The Questions of The Ages is an interactive PDF that aggregates experiences of 113 older adults to better understand social isolation and loneliness and explore what it means to live, age, and die well.
Tweaks and Twists: Bending a Systems Change Grant Application Towards the Arc of Justice
Eleven co-design sessions, hosted in partnership with Vancouver Foundation, helped to surface some of the dominant logics of systems change grantmaking, and highlight alternative ideas. Read insights and download a deck of ‘flip the logic’ cards.
BetaPhil Insights and Opportunities
We observed Vancouver Foundation’s grantmaking team at work to understand how we might strengthen equity and deepen the impact of the Systems Change Grant. Check out six broad opportunities for change.
Juicy Lessons From the Field
Change is a long and winding road. Not any innovation will get to breakthrough change. After five years in Canada, we’re distilling our top lessons learned. Join us in our Summer of Taking Stock.
Embedded Researcher Role Book
Principles, methods and practices for ethnography & design research
The Sense Maker
Eunica is one of about 87,000 family members who reunited in Canada in 2017. Wilson is one of about 21,000 government assisted refugees accepted to Canada in 2017. Hear their stories, and how emotional ambivalence is a very real (but not talked about) part of the settlement journey.
Ethnography and the Arts
We join forces with Massey Theatre to explore how arts relates to people’s flourishing. Here’s a sneak peek at our process.
Using Data to Generate Ideas
What is generative ethnographic research? What does it look like on the ground?
Meraki Portfolio
Research, service journey map, and prototypes for Meraki, version 1
Building Embedded Research Teams
Get a glimpse into the embedded research team at non-profit BACI. They are looking at the data systems in place — and what stories that data could about the conditions for trying out new things.
Building R&D Capacity: 2-years in
The Canadian welfare state is largely delivered by thousands of non-profits, funded to provide services to people in need. There are few dedicated resources to re-imagine need, and develop radically different responses. Since 2017, we’ve experimented with building R&D infrastructure in the social sector. Here’s our learning.
Beyond Social Services
What is the role of the arts in enabling social outcomes? Take a look at our research with Massey Theatre.
Using thick data to generate new ideas
We wrapped up our short immersive ethnographic research — Quick Dive — with Massey Theatre! Here’s a short sneak peek of our playback workshop with community organizations about some of the ideas that came up from the ground.
Justice Journeys
What is life like for Indigenous people charged under the criminal code in Peterborough or Toronto, Ontario? What shapes their perceptions and their journeys through the Criminal Justice System? What’s working for people? What gets in the way?
Convivial Cities
What is life like for older people living in the City of Vancouver – how do they perceive age, aging, and engaging? We partnered up with the City of Vancouver to meet older citizens to understand aging in rapidly changing communities. Check out some of our insights.
Rooms & Brooms
Over two weeks, we spent time in about 10 different rooming houses in Toronto’s east side, exploring what informs residents’ sense of belonging, agency and aspirations for the future. All so we could find opportunities for change.
School Halls & Strip Malls
When Filipino teens come to Canada, they aren’t just navigating a new culture but new familial relationships. We spent time where families were: church, buses, work, home. What emerged are 7 opportunity areas with ideas at both practice and system levels of what we can prototype and test to enable flourishing.
On & Off the Street in Surrey
We spent time in Whalley, Surrey getting to know some of the folks living in tents and a high-rise social housing complex. Within 10 minutes walk, one could find various meal services, shelters, and a safe injection site. Is it enough?
Bingo Halls & Shopping Malls
What is the lived experience of seniors (75+), living in the greater Vancouver area, whose engagement with social services and with their own social network is low? Read this trend report that we wrote as part of Grounded Data in collaboration with Allies in Aging and the Government of Canada.
Mini Marts & Shopping Carts
What is the lived experience of Edmonton citizens living rough? Is lack of coordination amongst existing services preventing better outcomes? What is a good outcome, for whom? How could we tap into the unusual suspects & community resources?
Develop & Deliver: Making the Case for Social R&D Infrastructure
What’s our infrastructure for supporting social Research & Development? Dr. Schulman compares sectors and defines what’s ‘innovation’ versus ‘invention’. (written for Employment & Social Development Canada).
Choreographing New Practices for Social Change
How do you build capacity for social change? Typical instruments for changing professional practice, which focus on strengthening an individual’s skill set, often prove unable to spur broader change.
An Argument for Grounded Change
How do we design solutions that can actually get to change? The core of our methodology is designing around 7 mechanisms of change. Read about those mechanisms here.
Grounded Space Offer
Want to know what Grounded Space can do for your organization? Read about our learning offer for individuals and Deep Dives for organizations.
Join Grounded Space
Grounded Space is a Research & Development Collective that brings together social service organizations to pool the resoures & risks of real social reform. Why joining as a member organiation? Read it in this publication.
Kudoz: a new learning platform with & for people with cognitive disabilities
Read the submission report for the 2016 Service Design Network conference, in which Kudoz was a finalist.
Ideas Press: poverty of experience facing adults with cognitive disabilities
Results of 10-week deep dive challenge thinking about social isolation
Push & Pull: Why practice, and what it could look like?
Download our report which shares 5 prototypes of new practices at a drop-in centre in downtown Toronto. This was some of the most challenging work we’ve done to date. Read why.
Redefining the politics of inclusion with George and Dustin
Article published in the Journal of Design Strategies, Volume 8, Fall 2016
Rough Guide to Emerging Practices
A guide to 5 emerging practices in the Homeless sector in Toronto
Learning Catalogue – October 10-13
Want to learn how to make social change sticky? Join us for a week of learning in Ottawa and Toronto from October 10-13. Download the catalogue to get all the deets.
Auricle in Transit: Stories by Station (2023)
The stories in this pack are a sampling of the 175+ stories collected at three of Edmonton’s transit stations: Churchill, Jasper Place, and Clareview. There is not single story of transit & wellbeing. What different themes and patterns do you spot.
Auricle in Transit: BIPOC Stories (2023)
The 10 stories in this pack are a sampling of stories from Edmontonians who identify as Indigenous, Black, South Asian, East/Southeast Asian, Latinx, and Middle Eastern. Rather than a representative sample, these stories are a starting point for exploring the many ways in which transit shapes wellbeing.
Auricle in Transit: Assorted Stories (2023)
In 2023, eight Local Listeners hung out in transit stations, buses, and LRTs to gather 175 stories about wellbeing. Here’s a small sampling of those stories.
Auricle in Alberta Ave 2021 – Book of Stories
In the summer of 2021, ten Local LIsteners set out to gather stories from their neighbours in Alberta Ave. This little book contains some of those stories.
Narrative Cards
A tool used to engage people exploring their narratives and beliefs about contribution. We asked people to sort these cards into ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘maybe’ piles, and then to walk us through each of their decisions and what each saying meant to them.
Retrospective Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 7
Decision Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 6
Intergenerational Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 5
Boundary Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 4
Purpose Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 3
Money Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 2
Origin Stories – PurposePhil Concept Book, Episode 1
Curiko Evaluation 2024
Tools, Methods and Learnings from Evaluating Curiko’s Theory of Action
Governance Report: Principles and practices for building collective agency
An exploration of alternate governance models, philosophies of decidion making, and prototyping collective agencies within two mature protoypes
Koognaasewin Learning from Staff Ethnographies
What we learned from staff working in the child welfare system and their stories
Auricle and Alberta Ave
What we heard and learned about wellbeing in the neighbourhood of Alberta Avenue
Auricle in Transit: Reflections and Learnings 2023
A compilation of our learnings, values, prototping questions, what we tested and learnings from bringing Auricle to the transit context in 2023.
Soloss One Pager for Encampments 2023
A short booklet describing Soloss in 2023, it’s third iteration, which was in the context of working with people in encampments
Soloss Book of Reflections
Learnings from Soloss’ second cohort, which took place in the context of frontline staff
From house to home to wellbeing
Ethnographic research, academic literature, and original ideas for designing affordable housing in ways that strengthen versus undermine wellbeing. Written to shape the City of Edmonton’s Housing Affordability strategy.
Picture this: A scrapbook of family stories, strengths, and speculative futures
Ethnographic stories, insights and visualized futures created with Anishinaabe families entangled in the child welfare system — all to shape the development of a new Indigenous law and system across North Shore Tribal Council communities.
So Loss, what have we learned?
Soloss is a new model for community grief & loss support, which creates new roles, rituals, and spaces for healing. Learn how its theory of change is playing out on-the-ground, and how Soloss contributes to mental health & recovery.
The Connector Role Prototype – A One Pager
A one-page summary of The Connector Role – an in-progress prototype focused on forging ties between marginalized Edmontonians and the rest of the community to access healing and to create the conditions for wellbeing.
Standing Up or Moving Forwards?
Read our report from the work we did with the women and staff from a domestic violence shelter in Apeldoorn, Netherlands
Limit-less
Download the playbill for lunch in the park. What kind of leadership is called for disrupting the status quo? What are our scripts, beliefs, and fears?
Behaviour change breakfast club
Download the playbill for our early morning wake-up call. How do we enable people to shift what they think, say, feel, and do?
Ethnography 101
Download the playbill for our sold out Ethno 101: a day of getting a feel for how ethnographic methods lead to fresh insights.
Beauty & shame walk
Download the playbill for our neighbourhood walk to unpick what makes a space or an interaction beautiful or shameful. Why does it matter?
Similar or different?
Download the playbill for Similar or Different, and explore what makes human-centred design similar or different to the community living and child & family sectors.
Time and space
Download the playbill for Reflective Practice 101. Conrad and Hedin (1990) remind us of Mark Twain’s cat who ‘learned from sitting on a hot stove lid…never to sit again’. Find out how not to be the cat.
Make-a-thon
Download the playbill for our Make-a-thon. Got ideas – but find they are stuck in your head or in conversation? We’ll show you how to make your ideas real, tangible, and testable. Bring along a tool or material you’d like help bringing to life.
Five people walk into a bar
Download the playbill for our drinking game. A sociologist, designer, anthropologist, business thinker and reflective practitioner walk into a bar… Do they walk out?
Human Interaction Design
Download the playbill for Human Interaction Design 101: an introductory session and neighbourhood walk to explore the idea that everything is designed, but not everything is human-centred. We’ll clarify the different types of design; and most of all, show what designing-in-context can bring to social services and social policy.
Big, Small, and Open
Download the playbill for our session: Big data, open data, and small data. Take a tour of different types of data and discuss when you’d use it, how, and why.
What is good?
One of our favorite philosophy books exploring well-being.
Grounded Space Learning Catalogue
From June 15-June 22, we’re hosting 12 immersive learning experiences in Vancouver. Downaload this catalogue and have a join us!
The Fifth Space in 5 episodes
Follow Sherri, Wendy and 26 other social service staff through the Fifth Space. The Fifth Space is a set of HR practices for growing staff capacity to test ideas, fail, and try again.
Grounded in the Canadian Government Executive
Grounded was featured in the March / April issue of the Canadian Government Executive. Download the article below.
Grounded, data with a story
Here’s the slides from the presentation Daniela Kraemer and Sarah Schulman gave at the ESDRC conference.
A Day In The Life: Testing Grounded In Ottawa
A Day In The Life: Testing Grounded data with civil servants In Ottawa
Ask-a-dude report
Ask A Dude is a catalogue of videos and a format for facilitated viewing parties, which promote frank discussions of sexuality, dating and relationships amongst men with cognitive disabilities. This report describes it all.
Testing Practice with Frontline Staff!
Unsure what we mean by practice? Watch our short film with Lindiwei, a frontline worker we’ve collaborated with to try new practice.
A theory of organizational readiness
Read a compelling theory shaping our thinking on organizational change readiness.
Design for systems change
Manuela, Lisa Joy, Sarah, Bobae, Krista and Wendy presenting at the RSD4 conference. And a sneak peek behind the scenes of making the presentation.