Toronto – Welcome to your Healthcare Future.

Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about our Canadian health practice and my colleagues up North. There have been some ups and downs over the last few years, but with those ups and downs come opportunities and I am proud to say we are in a position for launch. The convergence of an incredibly strong Canadian health market, our transformation from architecture to a solution design focused firm, and the malleable position of our Toronto office provides us with a unique opportunity for our Canadian practice to be who we want to be in the future, NOW.

Let me explain how these three forces are converging for an exciting future of healthcare in Canada:

The pandemic clearly identified capacity issues in existence that were exacerbated by the surge in patients during the pandemic. The outcomes:

• Health and research organizations are urging the federal and provincial government to increase capital expenditure for healthcare and health research.
• Data trends indicate healthcare organizations are beginning to focus on capital expenditure more aggressively.
• Long-term care facilities proved to be inadequate during the pandemic and focus has moved to adding capacity, improving the infrastructure and standards for long-term care.

It all adds up to the fact that Canadian healthcare is ripe for innovation and design that can capitalize on creative problem solving for and beyond infrastructure. And that is where CannonDesign and our partners at Blue Cottage of CannonDesign excel.

We are making an incredible pivot as a company to focus on solutions and not just architecture. It’s a shift that’s been occurring for years and is truly manifesting itself in our Living-Centered Design approach.

Living-Centered Design is uniquely capable of addressing complex challenges like those we’re seeing in Canada. Living-Centered Design addresses challenges through the lens of the broader ecosystems they exist within—helping healthcare systems, communities and more to create actual systemic change. For us, this could mean rethinking the operations of long-term care facilities, thinking about how changes in the community can influence social determinants of health or designing the next translational research hub.

 Our Toronto office is in the midst of an exciting evolution that puts them in the position to be these problem solvers. It is rebuilding its identity as a Living-Centered Design focused office, working on transformational projects such as West Park Healthcare Centre and York University Student Centre, building off the rich legacy of projects such as the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal and the Richmond Olympic Oval.

We’ve made a number of strategic hires that will bring forward-thinking solutions to life and are recruiting many incredible designers, thinkers and problem solvers to reflect the future our Canadian practice is headed towards.

We’re working towards making Canadian healthcare spaces and communities flourish and a design practice like no other —ready to join us?