Earth Day was first celebrated on April 22, 1970, aligning with the birth of environmental movements helping people and organizations reduce their environmental impact. It is now the largest participatory environmental movement in the world.

For those of us in the Vancouver area, it’s also a great reason to also get outside and take advantage of the warmer temperatures and brighter days.

Here’s how you can participate in Earth Day this year

Spend time enjoying the beauty Mother Nature has to offer in the location of your choice by running a 5K, 10K, or half marathon anytime, anywhere on April 22. For every registration, Race Roster will plant a tree on your behalf through One Tree Planted!

Support 20+ green vendors providing products, goods, and services that are locally sourced and focused on sustainable practices at the Earth Day Sustainability Market at Lulu Estates Winery on April 23. Food trucks, live music, and pet friendly.

The Celebrate Earth Day Festival is April 23 from 10:00 a.m to 2:00 p.m. at Memorial Peace Park in Maple Ridge. Celebrate Earth Day is hosted by Ridge Meadows Recycling Society and is one of the community’s largest festivals. Visit the website to learn more about attending the festival or their volunteer opportunities.

Check out the resources available through the EarthDay.org website. This year’s theme is “Invest In Our Planet”. Here, you can find information about ongoing projects like The Canopy Project which improves shared environments by planting trees across the world. You can even plan and register your own clean up event in your community. 

The City of Surrey is celebrating Earth Day with their Party for the Planet on April 30 from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Surrey Civic Plaza. The event activities include environmental workshops, Surrey Parks plant sale, speaker series, food trucks, clothing swap, and a plant giveaway.

The Earth Day Canada website also has many ways you can celebrate at home and include things like eating an organic meal with foods that are in season, replacing your light bulbs with low-energy light bulbs, and starting your own vegetable garden.

Let’s keep it clean on April 22—and every day!

On your next walk pick up one piece of garbage along your route, turn it into a fun family event, or even try “plogging” (picking up garbage while running!). Visit the Earth Day website to learn more about how you can “Celebrate Through Action, on Earth Day—April 22—and Every Day!”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is hard work and requires total commitment, a solid strategy, and a lot of cooperation. For some organizations, it can often feel like their actions towards DEI work are never enough.

We understand these challenges, and have worked hard to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture at OXD. We wanted to share how we use our sister company ThoughtFarmer’s Intranet product, which we named “Sparky”, to support our DEI efforts.

OXD has long valued DEI, and in 2020 we announced our actions towards continuing and improving our efforts. Volunteers across our practices formed a project team, “DANDI” (diversity and inclusion), to support ongoing DEI initiatives.

As part of these initiatives, we created a section on diversity and inclusion on Sparky. This way, helpful links and company information for our DEI work and initiatives are accessible to all employees. Some of the content in this section includes our internal initiatives, issues of our Diversity and Inclusion newsletter, Truth and Reconciliation resources, DEI workshop materials, and other reading and resource links.

OXD also takes advantage of ThoughtFarmer’s name pronunciation feature. This feature enables users to record an audio segment of themselves correctly pronouncing their name. The audio clip is then added to an employee’s profile page.

The addition of a pronoun field allows staff to add their identity—another important step in demonstrating respect and inclusion for all. This optional field is displayed prominently beside the user's name on their profile.

We use the intranet to share mental health resources, like information on anxiety and self-management strategies, as well as links to the Canadian Mental Health Association website for more resources. We include quick access to our extended medical insurance policy information on counselling coverage. Staff can also leave comments on tips and actions they take to help with their own mental health and wellbeing.

Our DEI work emphasizes transparency, helping us stay accountable and authentic to the work we’re doing. By surfacing our staff contributions and combined efforts on our intranet, we’re encouraged to keep taking action towards our goals.

Having brand values and a leadership team that supports inclusivity helps us create and sustain a workplace environment that is inclusive and accessible for all.

While DEI initiatives can take a lot of effort, we feel it’s important that we don’t get discouraged. Every step in the right direction, no matter how small, is an important step towards making our world a more equitable and just place.

At OXD we believe that design and the tools of the digital age should be used to benefit everyone equally. Learning to be inclusive in design is an ongoing practice, and we’d like to share our journey with you.

Subscribe to our Design for Inclusivity newsletter.

Each year, sporting organizations, communities, and not-for-profits from across the Yukon territory benefit from program funding made possible by Lotteries Yukon. The primary resource for accessing this funding is through the Lotteries Yukon website.

Lotteries Yukon has a mandate to give back to the Yukon community through art, sports, and recreation. But this mandate wasn't well known to the groups they are meant to serve. A key goal of the new website was to improve both awareness of and access to these benefits.

Since internet speeds in the Yukon tend to be much slower than other areas of Canada, it was important that we designed a modern, mobile-friendly website with quickly-loading pages. OXD worked with Lotteries Yukon to ensure that the information on their new website was easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to navigate. Beginning with competitive and comparative research, we developed a modern visual style that improved the user experience for site visitors. The new site now meets Government of Yukon service delivery standards, including French localization.

A well-established content management system (CMS) like Drupal offered increased security, mobile accessibility, and faster loading pages, while making it easier for internal staff to maintain the site.

Take a look at the redesigned Lotteries Yukon website.

If you're thinking about a website redesign, our free Website Planning Guide can help you get started with your planning.

OXD Service Designers will share how to uncover meaningful ideas and design solutions in a post-secondary educational context.

Jacqueline Antalik and Winnie Ho will facilitate a workshop on Frame Innovation at the Royal Roads Design Thinking Conference. Frame Creation is a technique where changing the approach to problems provides a breakthrough when developing solutions. The workshop introduces participants to Frame Creation and Exploration, a method that discovers new approaches for complex “wicked" problems. Derived from Kees Dorst and his work on Frame Innovation, this method explores paradoxes in design through reframing. 

"The conference welcomes all who are grappling with how to best foster design thinking—post-secondary educators, consultants, organizational employees, and researchers—to come together in a spirit of collective learning and cross-fertilization."

—Royal Roads University

The Royal Roads Design Thinking Conference, “Leading Design Thinking in the Classroom and the Workplace: A Conference for Postsecondary Educators and Organizational Practitioners” is a virtual event that will be held on March 6, 2022, with pre-conference events scheduled on March 5. The event will feature keynote addresses, networking opportunities, and participant-led sessions. Participants will learn practical skills to help lead Design Thinking in the workplace or in the classroom.

To learn more, and to register, visit the Royal Roads conference website.

It’s time to get festive! It’s the year of the Tiger (虎), one of the 12 signs in the Chinese zodiac. According to some, the Year of the Tiger will mean big changes, risk-taking, and adventure. Social progress, enthusiasm towards others, and generosity will be at an all-time high.

“No matter what your sign is, ​​the year of the Tiger (Water Tiger), will bring a changing travel landscape”.

Edgar Lok Tin Yung, Feng Shui Master and consultant

Good news? We hope so! To help celebrate the Lunar New Year (also Chinese New Year) that starts February 1, we’ve put together a few ways for Vancouver area residents to enjoy local festivities, learn about traditions, and of course, eat their way into 2022.

An intricate part of our local history

The Lunar New Year is a big part of Vancouver’s culture and history. The first Chinese New Year Parade in Vancouver was held in Chinatown in 1973, and it’s now an annual tradition organized by the Chinese Cultural Centre. Visit the Chinese Cultural Centre website to learn more about 2022 events.

Where to celebrate Lunar New Year 

Lunarfest Vancouver is February 5 and 6 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m at šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square, North of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and offers activities including Lunar Tea and fortune telling.

The Asian Canadian Special Events Association, with Granville Island’s support, has partnered with local artists to curate six large-scale lanterns, now installed in the outdoor courtyard of the Ocean Art Works Pavilion. Learn more about Lantern City from January 29 to February 21. 

Into the Light (在燈光之中) is an all-ages, immersive experience created by Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist Stephanie Wong and award-winning Richmond-based artist Marina Szijartoruns. It runs from February 18 to 20 at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond.

FlyOver Canada is featuring the film “Soar Over Taiwan” during the Lunar New Year period, which highlights some of Taiwan’s most iconic sites and landscapes.

The Kitsilano Community Centre is hosting China: Presentation & Chinese New Year, an event for the community to learn and celebrate the Chinese New Year on February 2 from 1 to 2:30 p.m.

Restaurants offering Lunar New Year eats, treats, and beverages.

Sun Sui Wah will have a Chinese New Year set dinner for four, including Poon Choi that people can preorder online. Often translated as "big bowl feast”, this communal-style festival meal consists of many layers served in a large bowl or basin called a poon. 

A.Bento 飯匠 is offering limited Tiger Gift boxes that can be pre-ordered starting January 18, and the last day to order is January 28. Choose from three boxes or a combination of them, including yummy treats like candies and homemade sauces, or a meal box that has fish, pork, and rice dishes. 

Heritage Asian Eatery’s Lunar New Year Feast for four includes delectables like Cured Chinese Hamand Prawn Dumplings, Sticky Rice Buns, Gai Lan, Chicken Wings with Truffle Salt, and Biang Biang Noodles. It’s available January 28 to February 6 for dine-in or take-out at their Broadway location.

Cold Tea Restaurant on Granville Street is offering special dishes along with crafty cocktails like their “Confucius Punch Bowl”, which features Baijiu, a Chinese distilled liquor.

Let’s roar into 2022, together.

The theme for this year’s LunarFest is “Together, Stronger”, so let’s wish each other prosperity and good fortune throughout this Lunar New Year. 

The UVic Law 325, ‘Access to Justice: Designing Change in the Legal Sector’ course confronts the fact of diminishing access to justice and responds with proactive, problem-solving, and human-centred approaches. The aim is to provide both theoretical and practical frameworks and methods to help students recognize, understand, and respond to access to justice issues.

The course is taught by Professor Robert Lapper, QC who is the Lam Chair in Law and Public Policy at University of Victoria. Gord will present to students on January 13, 2022.

Sharing our experiences in designing for justice with projects like the BC Online Divorce Assistant​ is one of the ways OXD supports access to justice initiatives. Our work with the Ministry of the Attorney General of British Columbia on this project helped provide fair and equitable access to justice through Agile development and citizen-centred design. 

We’d be happy to speak about our experience at your next event or initiative.

Please contact us to learn more.

Planning a new website can be exciting, but have you thought about how you're going to take your old website content and move it to your new website?

We’ve often seen clients leave content migration to the last minute, thinking it’s just a matter of copy-and-pasting or pushing a button. Surely the hardest part of the project is actually designing and building the new website, right?

Well, not really…

In our guide Ready, Set, Migrate, we show how migration isn’t just about moving stuff—it’s a chance at a new beginning. Use this guide to learn the steps, in detail, that will give you a better understanding of how to plan and manage your project’s content migration process.

We’ve used these same steps with many of our clients.

Get the tools you need to walk your team through the planning and management of your project’s content migration process.

Download our free content migration guide.