Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Shauna Levy, president and CEO of Design Exchange, Canada's only museum dedicated exclusively to design, and I believe that design can change the world.
Canada has an industry of hundreds of thousands of designers employed in graphics, fashion, industry, architecture, interiors, hospitals, and more. The DX—Design Exchange— reflects this industry as a unique cultural presentation space.
Thank you, Madam Chair, and committee, for inviting me to speak today. With a mandate to demonstrate the value and importance of design to everyday life, DX was launched 25 years ago. The City of Toronto gifted the original Toronto Stock Exchange for 99 years rent-free, and the developers, Cadillac Fairview, provided a grant of $500,000 a year for 25 years to cover operational expenses. This grant sunsetted in 2015.
Seven years ago, Lord Cultural Resources, completed a strategic plan that I was recruited to implement. The Lord plan made two recommendations: to be a design museum offering programs with broad public appeal, and to launch a design festival. In the case of the former, I installed Stefan Sagmeister's Happy Show, and Christian Louboutin's 20-year retrospective borrowed from London's Design Museum. We also developed our own shows: This Is Not a Toy, a show on street art, guest-curated by the performer-singer Pharrell Williams; and Politics of Fashion | Fashion of Politics with Canadian icon Jeanne Beker.
These four shows attracted over 75,000 mostly first-time visitors and increased DX admission by 300%. We earned 800 million global media impressions, and for the first time DX saw a meaningful increase in revenue. For example, Louboutin brought in a record revenue of $250,000 in corporate sponsorship and about the same in provincial government grants. Yet, given the current funding landscape for museums, it remained difficult to cover our costs. To complicate things further, the more we used space for programming, the less it could be rented out for venue rental, which is our most significant revenue stream.
Around this time I had two conversations that led us to the next stage of our evolution. First, when I asked Pharrell why he curated the show pro bono, he said that people are often intimidated by contemporary art and stand in front of an art gallery afraid to walk in. He explained that street art was accessible and served as an introduction to cultural expression. The second conversation was with a city councillor who represents a high-priority neighbourhood. He asked me to think about the kids out there.
First, Pharrell was right. We received phone calls from young adults asking us what the dress code was because they simply had never been to a museum before. Second, the councillor's question made me think about relevance, diversity, and accessibility, so much so that this became a starting point for the next phase, DX Satellite.
DX Satellite was launched. In addition to our home at the Toronto Stock Exchange, we became nomadic with pop-up installations throughout the Greater Toronto Area. The 3DXL exhibition illustrated the impact of 3D printing on architecture, while Smarter. Faster. Tougher. was an exhibition on innovative sportswear design held during the Pan Am Games.
We evolved a robust series of educational programs, tours, and customized workshops for high-priority neighbourhoods. These programs continue to grow. We annually engage with approximately 90,000 visitors and participants and have approximately 200,000 friends and followers through social media. We did a project at Union Station with Luminato and our high-priority neighbourhood programming.
In 2015, further to the strategic plan, we developed the concept for a design festival and biennial, leading to our most ambitious and acclaimed project to date, EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation, and Technology. EDIT was a 10-day interactive and immersive festival that looked at how design innovation and technology can make the world a better place for all people. It was held in 2017 to celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary. It wasn't until I learned about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 that EDIT's raison d'etre really became clear. I was excited about the prospect that our planet could achieve these goals, but moreover I saw them as design challenges. I met with the UN in New York and asked them to partner with us on EDIT.
We repurposed the deserted Unilever factory in Toronto, occupying 150,000 square feet with an immersive experience of curated exhibits by global thought-leaders like Bruce Mau and Carlo Ratti. Featuring 50 installations by Canada's leading architects and designers, it hosted 40 workshops and 125 speakers, including Ian Campeau, Marije Vogelzang, and David Suzuki. Topics included design solutions for rising sea levels, the indigenous housing crisis, food waste, and affordable housing. We provided a platform for the country's architects, designers, and innovators to create interactive experiences to demonstrate how they could ingenuously solve global challenges.
For only $15 a ticket, we created an immersive and accessible experience and aimed to eliminate barriers to entry. Some 35,000 visitors, including 6,000 school kids who were admitted for free, attended. Ninety per cent of surveyed visitors would return for the next edition.
As EDIT continues, we're excited about working more closely with the school boards to develop design tool kits that encourage students to think about and solve the sustainable development goals in their own communities.
From a $5 million project, we scaled it back to $3.9 million. About 50% of the funding was provided by the Government of Ontario and the City of Toronto, with the other half raised through corporate sponsorship, ticket sales, and donations.
I was really interested to read Rene Rivard's claim that we've now entered a phase of “museum of ideas”, something I couldn't agree more with. While design can be about making beautiful things, it's also about developing solutions.
EDIT was, and continues to be, about adaptive reuse. As urbanist Jane Jacobs famously said, “New ideas require old buildings.” As the cost of real estate continues to rise in our urban centres and funding becomes increasingly challenging for museums, we continue to innovate cultural expression placemaking by repurposing space. EDIT taught us that we don't have to dummy down our content, but rather, we have to be accessible, authentic, diverse, and relevant.
Neither EDIT nor one of the DX programs mentioned above has received federal government support. Design Exchange, as a Canadian museum, has often been told that we're not eligible for Canadian Heritage programs. When we applied for support for EDIT, it was the same story. We continue to diversify our programs. We engage all sectors and talk about issues that touch us all. We're directed to other ministries like ISED or Global Affairs, who have rallied us back to Canadian Heritage.
We hear discussion about design becoming part of the definition of the creative industries, yet we await specific details. We spend valuable time strategizing about funding, about ways to engage corporate sponsors. It takes money to make money. I've often lamented the state of the small cultural institution in Canada, the vicious cycle of insufficient funding impacting programming and marketing, leading to small audiences and resulting in insufficient funding, and so on. I have often thought that we should band our resources together to create shared spaces and align with other institutions, cultural or otherwise.
We ask you to consider a few things: that the definition of museum experience not be exclusively defined by what goes on within a museum’s bricks and mortar; that funding activities remain flexible to account for the shifting realities of the sector; that funding programs be opened up and resourced to include design institutions and designers; that we have an inter-ministerial approach to culture and heritage that accounts for the cross-sector nature of projects and programming and leverages a variety of resources for broad impact.
This is an exciting time for the design industry and Canada's museum sector. We look forward to working with you and other stakeholders.
Thank you.