IdeaLab Research · Insight
Insight is a collaborative research process for problems that cannot be understood well from a single perspective.
It helps people connect questions, knowledge, methods, places and experiences, then use those connections to develop better questions and deeper understanding.
Insight is currently in its first pilot.Why Insight?
Insight is easier to understand if we begin with the problem it responds to, then look at what it does, and finally see where it fits within IdeaLab Research.
Many important problems do not belong to one discipline, one dataset, one institution or one place. A health problem may involve housing, income, transportation and environment. A child-welfare decision may involve rights, family, culture, services, geography and institutions.
Research can become fragmented when each part is examined separately. We may collect more information without seeing how the pieces change one another.
Insight starts with a question, identifies what is connected to it, makes those relationships visible, brings different perspectives together, tests ideas and compares what changes across contexts.
The purpose is not to make every problem interdisciplinary or geographic. It is to recognize when a connection changes what the question means.
IdeaLab Research provides the wider environment in which Insight can happen: people, questions, communities, research methods, data, learning, resources, technology and publishing.
Insight is therefore not a separate destination. It is one way IdeaLab connects what its members know with questions that need to be explored.
See the idea in practice
A connected problem rarely stays inside one subject. Explore two examples. The questions are deliberately different, but the same Insight process can be used with both.
Example 01
At first, the answer may seem straightforward: increase tree cover. But a better question begins when we ask what else is connected to that intervention.
Who lives in the hottest neighbourhoods? Where are trees missing? Who has access to parks and shaded streets? How much water will additional vegetation require? Where are people most exposed? Could neighbourhood improvements affect housing costs?
The question is no longer simply about temperature. It is about how heat connects with health, water, housing, infrastructure, mobility and inequality.
Put urban heat at the centre and explore the relationships around it. Select a connection.
Heat exposure can affect health, especially for people with greater vulnerability.
Health effectA map can show where heat is concentrated. Another can show tree canopy. Others can show population characteristics, housing conditions, health vulnerability or access to cooling spaces.
Overlay them and a different pattern may emerge. But the map also creates new questions.
The important step is not simply mapping more variables. It is asking what each spatial relationship means.
A single intervention can create benefits and trade-offs at the same time.
Original question: How can a city reduce dangerous heat?
Possible research directions include:
Synthesis is not about producing one answer. It is about producing a better question.
The same intervention may produce different results in different places.
Researchers and contributors can test the same idea using different datasets, methods, communities and contexts.
The comparison is part of the research.
Example 02
The Best Interests of the Child principle appears simple: What is in the best interests of the child?
But answering that question can involve safety, health, education, family relationships, culture, identity, services, community, the child's own views, institutional responsibilities and available resources.
Different decision-makers may weigh these considerations differently. Different sectors may interpret the principle differently. What appears to be the best decision in one context may not produce the same result somewhere else.
This makes Best Interests a useful example of a problem that cannot be understood through one discipline or one dataset.
Put the child at the centre and explore the surrounding context.
Relationships, caregiving and family circumstances can influence decisions.
RelationshipGeography does not tell us what is “best.” But geography can help us understand conditions surrounding a decision.
Where does the child live? How far are essential services? What transportation is available? Are services accessible in the child's language and cultural context? What resources exist in the community? What happens when a child moves between communities?
And access is not necessarily the same as experience or outcome.
The purpose here is conceptual. Changing one condition can change the meaning of access; it does not produce a numerical “Best Interests score.”
Initial question: What does it mean to act in the best interests of a child?
Possible research directions include:
Quantitative and spatial evidence can describe conditions surrounding children and decisions, while qualitative, community, Indigenous and child-centred knowledge can help interpret what those conditions mean.
The same principle may be interpreted differently across places, jurisdictions, communities, cultures and institutional settings.
The comparison is not about ranking children, communities or places. It is about understanding how context shapes the meaning and application of a principle.
Future examples may explore food and nutrition, water security, housing, sanitation and health, energy, climate adaptation and other questions where relationships between systems and contexts matter.
From examples to a method
Urban heat begins with an environmental and public-health problem. Best Interests begins with a rights-based principle and a difficult decision-making problem. Yet both can be explored through the same sequence.
Start with a question that matters. Do not rush to define the answer.
Identify systems, people, places, disciplines and forms of knowledge connected to the question.
Make relationships visible through geographic maps, conceptual maps, networks, datasets, timelines or other representations.
Bring perspectives together and look for patterns, gaps, contradictions, benefits and trade-offs.
Take the better question into evidence, research or practice using methods appropriate to the problem.
Ask what changes across places, populations, disciplines, methods and contexts.
How we look
A connected problem often crosses disciplinary boundaries. Health may connect with geography. Geography may connect with economics. Economics may connect with environment. Policy may connect with lived experience.
Insight brings these perspectives into the same research conversation without assuming one discipline can answer the whole question.
A finding is never completely detached from where it comes from. An intervention that works in one city may work differently somewhere else.
Insight asks not only What works? but also: Where does it work, for whom, under what conditions, and what changes when the context changes?
Insight within IdeaLab Research
IdeaLab Research is designed to connect people, knowledge, tools, learning, research and publishing. Insight gives those connections a question to work around.
Researchers, students, practitioners, communities and organizations bring different experiences and forms of knowledge.
Research papers, local knowledge, policy, data, methods, maps, lived experience and other evidence can be brought into relationship.
Insight gives those people and resources a shared problem to examine rather than requiring everyone to begin from the same discipline.
Spatial, quantitative, qualitative, institutional, community, Indigenous and mixed methods can be used where they are appropriate.
Members can examine how an idea changes across neighbourhoods, communities, jurisdictions, countries and other settings.
An exploration may lead to a question, dataset, analysis, collaboration, conversation, policy direction, research paper or another useful outcome.
Over time, those connections can move from exploration to research, learning, collaboration and publication.
Positioning
Insight does not claim to invent the concepts that make these explorations possible. Researchers, communities, practitioners, Indigenous knowledge holders and institutions have developed rich bodies of knowledge around rights, health, environment, equity, access, culture, place and decision-making.
Insight creates a space for bringing those contributions into relationship. It asks what becomes visible when established ideas are placed beside one another and examined together.
Spatial thinking
Maps are powerful because they help us see patterns. But seeing a pattern does not automatically explain it.
A map can show where services are located. It cannot by itself tell us whether people can use them.
A map can show where heat is concentrated. It cannot by itself tell us how residents experience that heat.
A map can show inequality. It cannot by itself determine what a fair response should be.
Spatial evidence becomes more useful when it is interpreted alongside other evidence and knowledge.
Insight uses maps and spatial analysis as one way of thinking alongside other forms of evidence and knowledge. The objective is not to make every problem geographic. It is to recognize when geography changes the question.
Evidence
Where is something?
Who can reach it?
How is it experienced?
What difference does it make?
Who benefits, who is constrained, and who may be left behind?
How is the situation understood, and what should be done under the circumstances?
Different methods become useful at different points. The goal is not to replace one method with another, but to connect evidence appropriately.
Where questions become difficult
Protecting someone may involve disrupting relationships that also matter.
Making a service available does not mean people can or want to use it.
The most efficient allocation may not produce the most equitable outcome.
A consistent policy may produce different consequences in different places.
Expert knowledge and lived experience may reveal different parts of the problem.
A statistical relationship can identify a pattern without explaining why it exists.
Treating people the same can produce different outcomes when circumstances differ.
These tensions are not necessarily problems to eliminate. They can be places where better research questions emerge.
Context
A single study can produce a useful finding. Comparison can reveal what depends on context.
Another neighbourhood, city, rural community, province or country may reveal a different relationship.
Another dataset, method, discipline or form of knowledge may reveal something the first approach could not.
The same policy or intervention can be experienced differently by different people and communities.
Comparison is not simply about ranking places. It is about understanding what changes and why.
Research space
Insight can bring different research approaches into the same exploration without requiring them to become one method.
Mapping, accessibility, spatial inequality and geographic relationships.
Surveys, statistical analysis, indicators and comparative analysis.
Interviews, lived experience, narratives and interpretation.
Policies, legislation, organizations and decision-making structures.
Local knowledge, priorities and place-based experience.
Indigenous laws, knowledge, relationships, culture, territory and self-determination.
Bringing different forms of evidence together where the question requires it.
Testing whether relationships, interventions or interpretations change across contexts.
Where Insight can go next
The examples on this page show how Insight works as a way of thinking. The next stage is to make that process participatory within the IdeaLab community.
Members will eventually be able to bring questions around different topics and contribute knowledge, evidence, methods, places, experiences and new questions.
This will become a separate part of the platform. It will explain how an Insight discussion is opened, supported, contributed to, documented, credited and brought to a close.
The purpose is not to turn every discussion into a formal research project. Some may simply produce a better question. Others may lead to collaboration, data work, comparative research, learning activities or publication.
Possible outcomes
Sometimes the most useful result is discovering what should actually be studied.
A connection may reveal information that needs to be collected or linked.
A question may require mapping, accessibility analysis or spatial comparison.
Testing an idea across contexts can reveal what changes and what remains consistent.
Some questions need dialogue and interpretation before they need more analysis.
An exploration may eventually contribute to a report, presentation, paper or other shared work.
Research foundations
Insight does not claim ownership of the underlying concepts used in its examples. The Best Interests example draws on children’s-rights scholarship, child-centred decision-making, moral decision-making, political geography, Indigenous perspectives and empirical research.
Sara Jayne Dzaman’s University of Saskatchewan dissertation, Human Service Executives’ Insights on the Best Interests of the Child (2015), is one useful source for understanding how human-service executives have interpreted and applied Best Interests across sectors.
The example also connects with scholarship examining the political and geographic dimensions of children’s lives, including space, place, scale, citizenship and state practices.
The Indigenous dimension recognizes Indigenous laws, cultures, relationships, communities and territories. In Canada, the federal framework concerning First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families connects Best Interests with cultural continuity and substantive equality.
Urban heat draws on environmental science, public health, geography, urban planning, infrastructure, housing, water, energy and equity research.
Contributing
You do not need to understand the whole problem before contributing.
Start with one connection: a place, dataset, community, discipline, experience, method or question.
What does that connection reveal? What does it challenge? What becomes visible when it is placed beside another perspective?
Quantitative, qualitative, spatial, community and Indigenous forms of knowledge can each contribute something different.
The aim is not to have the fastest answer. It is to make the question better and the understanding deeper.
IdeaLab Research · Insight
A connected problem can become a shared exploration. One question can open many connections. One connection can lead to a better question.
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