Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

When I first started with MEIC and OCAD University as the lead researcher on a major provincial mobile study in the spring of 2008, I had no idea where it would go. We had pretty clear objectives regarding the duration and outcomes of the study, and I expected the project to conclude after about a year. Little did we know how deep and utterly insanely transformational the impact of smartphones would be in North America, and especially in Canada. The landscape today is a very different, very exciting beast. I’m thrilled that we have been able to grow MEIC from a small consortium of committed stakeholders to a non-profit, member organization devoted to the growth of startups and the commercialization of the awesome mobile research that happens in Canada.

We’ve been able to listen to businesses, to academics, to students, to other non-profits and to government about their challenges and needs and we’ve been able to create programs that we’re hoping will serve our members in the years to come. Looking back, we’ve made an indelible mark on the Ontario mobile startup community: multiple events, including two years of Mobile Innovation Week, 22 applied research collaborations linking startups, corporations and students, international missions representing Canadian companies and a whole slew of other partnerships. There have been a number of amazing people who have nurtured this along the way (OCAD President Sara Diamond, my amazing Board of Directors, the OMDC, the Toronto startup scene and countless partners and contributors. <3). It's been a hell of a ride.

But, over the past six months, I've noticed a desire for something different and a little bit of professional envy with the amazing companies we've been working with. As an enabling force and facilitator, I am less likely to find myself with my sleeves rolled up designing products, hashing out strategy and delivering new and amazing things to the market. I have always been a maker and a builder, and I could feel that aspect missing in my work.

And so I am stoked to announce that I am moving to Transcontinental Media as their Mobile Strategist, starting next week. I’ll be developing products and services and figuring out how TCM can leverage mobile as a major channel, working with fantastic brands and some amazing talent (as well as the great folks from recently acquired Vortex Mobile and Lipso). Apps, mobile web, tablets and e-readers, oh my! I’ll be based in Toronto with time in Montreal and NY, so ping me for lunch if you think there’s something we can work on together.

As well, I’m very happy to remain involved with MEIC, and have been invited to sit on the Board of Directors for 2011. And while we’ve hired an Interim Director for the next few months, we are definitely looking for someone awesome to lead MEIC going forward. Know someone? Let me know!!!

2011 is going to be an AWESOME year.

on expectation and prototyping experience, or how i left a bag of stuff at the roadside in france

in early 2004, i was working full-time in my metalsmithing studio – designing and making, exhibiting, teaching. there was alot on my plate, and at some point i stopped and asked myself why and for what i was doing this. i realized that i was burnt out and dissatisfied with the route my practice had taken and needed a break. within 3 months i’d left the studio and was thinking about a trip to france and spain. i’d recently purchased a road bike, and decided that the best way to see these places would be from my bike. and so it began.

over the summer, i learned as much as i could about cycling on the road and france. what equipment and supplies to bring, how bikes worked and how to fix them, what other people’s experiences were on the road, what the routes could be, all the while training to ride upwards of 100k at a time. i relearned the french language, and about french culture, attitudes towards biking, social and geographic topographies. my inexperience was tempered (or so i thought) with my desire to learn, as well as the leap towards uncertainty i was taking – while the route was more or less mapped, the journey itself was completely unknown.

i flew to paris in late september, and after a few days took a train to vernon, close to monet’s hometown of giverny. i awoke early and readied my bike, bought a croissant at the boulangerie, and walked out of town, prepared to ride the 120K or so to dieppe. excitedly, i got on my bike and started to pedal. and immediately stopped – the bike’s shimmy was so severe the bike literally wouldn’t ride.

for all the planning and coordinating, i’d never weighed my gear, or done a test ride fully loaded before leaving. and i’d overplanned, thinking i was heading to the moon rather than the country that invented the bicycle. even though just about every small french hamlet has a bike shop, in my preparedness i’d brought something for every worst case scenario i could think of at the time. spare parts galore – tires, tubes, chains. clothing for bad weather, and rehydration capsules just in case. guides to cycling in france + italy, backpacking guides, road atlases, plug adaptors for asia… when i tried to get underway, the rear weight imbalance was insane enough to render a ride impossible and potentially snap my steel frame. epic fail.

why?

a pretty understandable error, after all, but one that could have serious consequences in a different context, because prototyping the experience (ie – a ride around the block fully loaded) wasn’t part of my vernacular at the time. for all the worst-case-scenario planning, i was oblivious to one of the most obvious conditions. it’s in our nature to plan and create expectations, even though that often blindsides our tacit understanding – our doing – and our knowledge of experience.

looking back, this was a critically important lesson, and one that i’m still learning. first, there will always be weak signals that can drastically change the path of any situation. one way to reposition a potential disruption is to prototype experiences – literally, or through scenarios/visualizations where imagined narratives build an experiential or latent context and encourage solutions. exploring possibiloty to live and grow in the wild, and if that’s not possible, we need to imagine the wild in all it’s glorious wooliness.

second, the ability to assess and adapt to changing situations while maintaining some sort of equilibrium is learned through experience. you gotta mess up a few times and look for the patterns in the situation and response, finding ways to tailor behaviours and methods. lose what’s unnecessary and get back on the bike – the adventure will still be there.

ilunch next week!

we’re thrilled to be presenting the latest ilunch panel at the gladstone hotel next friday – time to get serious about serious games!

joe biglin, co-founder of breakaway games and training port strategies, will discuss the future of elearning and serious games – how business models are changing, the definition of what a serious game or simulation is, and the further integration with and impact on culture and education. he’ll be joined with gary woodill from brandon hall research, michael gibson of zapdramatic, jeremy friedberg of spongelab interactive and vive technologies, and nick taylor, a phd student from york university’s faculty of education, for an awesome discussion and one on one meetings.

links for registration and more info here. hope to see you there!!

heading to LIFT08

v v happy to be flying back to geneva this year for the ever-awesome LIFT conference. huge props to laurent, nicolas, sylvie and the rest of the LIFT team for putting together another really fantastic program. bruce sterling, bill cockayne,  lee bryant, julian bleecker, fabien girardin, stephanie booth, henriette weber andersen and noel hidalgo will be among the many giving talks, leading conversations and workshopping. tom is also giving what looks to be awesome workshop on the future of wireless. oof, unfortunately with the conference last week and project applications all over the place, i missed the deadline to submit…

regardless, i’m looking forward to catching up with friends, meeting new people and having my mind saturated with absolutely fantastic conversations. a new element this year is the venture night – where new startups give us their pitch! and there’s the threat of switzerland’s biggest. fondue. evar. <cheese glee>

scotchcamp tonite!

photo by asmunder

the torcamp scotchcamp holiday social will be happening tonight at allen’s on the danforth, from 8pm onwards. stop in to warm up from the cold, and share a bit of cheer. as well, allen’s has a fine selection of over 160 scotches, whiskies and bourbons, and plenty of other options for those whose palate marches to a different drum. and also there’s great food! see you there!

• when: december 17, 8pm
• where: allen’s on the danforth, 143 danforth ave (just east of broadview, south side)

return to yyz

sacher torte & ruby port

back from vienna a week already, followed by days of unpacking the new house and wrapping up loose ends for work. it was an interesting trip, and an interesting conference.

while the content was good and engaging, i hate to say it but knowledge, creativity and transformations of societies was poorly organized and not very well thought out, which is a shame as it could have been so much better with just a bit of different effort, ironic given it’s name and mandate… a few things that bothered me…

panel locations weren’t advertised (even general street signage was lacking) and were spread across the city, there was little in the way of networking and meeting with your fellow attendees. and there wasn’t any wifi, which, isn’t so important in the long run.

but those were the little qualms. the biggest problem was that the organizers rescheduled the panel i was on about 6 days before the conference began. originally set to go on friday, we were moved to sunday, which meant that some people missed the panel as their flights were leaving sunday afternoon, or that they were rescheduled to present at 8am. yikes!

beyond that, the content was really really great. mark rectanus, from the university of iowa, spoke about the tensions between institutional knowledge and emergent knowledge (universities and wikipedia, for example), and ways to reconcile this through teaching, dialogue, active participation with one’s students, etc.

and tatjana chorney, from st mary’s in halifax, spoke about transformational teaching methods that also speak to mark’s themes – that while instructors still need to communicate a historical or contextual knowledge base in their curriculi, there’s also an increased need to facilitate and broker knowledge acquisition, insight and analysis as well – the skills and creative impetus to understand and act upon information.

my paper touched upon the underlying dynamics that aid in that facilitation – how groups form, how they trust and read each other so that knowledge can permeate throughout a community. three overlapping areas, and i’m honored that i was able to speak to theirs and the others work. well done, everyone!!

vienna itself is a lovely city – bourgeousie architecture and winding laneways, grand palaces and wiener wurstl stands everywhere. i completely fell in love with the food – especially apfelpunsch, and the people were kind and hospitable. looking forward to another trip in the future!

wienerschnitzel and spritzers

i’ll be in the lovely land of st. stephen next week to present my paper (tacit knowing in digital communities) at KCTOS 2007.

if you’re nearby, ping me as i’ll have a couple of days to explore the city.

all this useless beauty

cali balles, photo

i came across this paper* while researching for my project and prepping for the last lecture of the year before presentations, and it really highlights some of the ideas i’ve spoken about previously as well as given articulate phrasing to some really interesting connections in the relationship between craft, design and digital technology. craft and design have had a schism since the industrial revolution, when, for all intents and purposes, design was born. greg calls design ‘creation for reproduction’ – making with the direct intention of replicating, and thus requiring systems and standards to ensure exactness throughout that reproductive process. and most digital technology reflects this, presenting us with clean and simple efficiencies of form but very little humanity. i think that craft, however, embodies a bit more of our humanity as the unique experience of making by hand can’t be replicated and our tools and processes do not become extensions of ourselves, but rather interfaces in an empathetic relationship with the materials, the ideas, the user and ourselves. and beauty.

jayne wallace and mike press (the latter of whom is speaking this week in halifax at nscad university’s neocraft conference- i SO WISH i was there) express their thoughts on the role of beauty in craft, it’s approximation in design and it’s role in creating better digital technologies.

1st part of the excerpts below (2nd to follow shortly)

Beauty, we argue, plays a vital role in humanising technology and ensuring its cultural relevance… Industrial design can
employ the illusion of beauty to temper the beast of technology by providing a veneer of desire, seduction and usability. But let us not confuse eternal beauty with the passionate but fast fading blooms of desire. We enjoy the delights of the G4 Powerbook as much as the next fashion-conscious academic, but only as a well designed one night stand at the orgiastic party of our consumer culture.

moar

stu-stu-studio

i’m super excited that prime gallery, canada’s oldest gallery for craft and the decorative arts, is now carrying my work. check it out! stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood – they carry some of canada’s most renowned artists and have a pretty awesome exhibition schedule. i’ll also be participating in a group show there running from 1-dec to 22-dec, called around the neck. :)

as well, in october i attended two workshops offered by interaccess electronics arts centre as part of their fall schedule. in terms of awesomeness, they were off the chart!!

intro to electronics was a 2-day weekend workshop that, true to its name, covered the basics of electronics, which is great for someone who only sort of understood how the toaster works – ohms and resistors, current, voltage, how breadboards work and how to make motors spin and LEDs blink. taught by rob cruickshank – an awesome guy with tons of knowledge!

intro to microcontrollers was also very cool – tom came to this one to, and learning how to make a series of LEDs blink like KITT with the arduino platform was enough to totally make our day! a fairly simple platform with tons of online resources, i like arduino because of its accessibility. i don’t know squat about programming or building chips/boards, and it’s sort of a tough thing to dabble in, but gord hicks rocked the workshop and i’ll be looking forward to many winter nights spent in the interaccess studio (available to all studio members 24/7), experimenting and making stuff.

they also have a really cool blog!

el vampiro and intuition

in august i spent a couple of days in nyc, in search of conversations and connection. this post is a bit delayed, but such is the nature of being what tom calls pathologically busy. it was really fantastic to touchbase with friends and colleagues, old and new, and flow into the local velocity, and belated thanks is due to those who put up with my questions over lunch or dinner (thx scott, john, elena, baker!). nyc is one of the few places where i feel like the pace of the external environment is matched with what’s going on inside. it would more likely than not make me bonkers to stay for any extended length, but refreshing in short spurts.

i dropped by eyebeam research lab during their open studio hours and chatted with a few of the residents and fellows about what they’re up to. i highly recommend pinging them if you’re in the neighbourhood on tuesday afternoons. it’s a fantastic space, with really incredible people who are fully engaged in their work and totally open about what they want to do. amazing.

michael dila, a fellow overlapper and perpetual troublemaker, was also in the big apple that week and was kind enough to organize an nyc overlap meetup, as serendipity encouraged all those little ducks to line up. an awesome conversation with michael, dave walczyk, paul pangaro, vic lombardi and manuel toscano ensued – somewhat raucous and always inspiring.

conversation eventually turned to innovation, creativity, imagination, the strengthening relationship between business and design practice, and passion. what fuels these things? where do they come from, and what conditions encourage and cultivate them? a recurring conversation that i hope to continue having.

the gem in this conversation was this. to some degree, we are all guided by intuition, the immediate, somewhat difficult to communicate compass that shapes our behaviour in more ways than we perhaps are conscious of.

intuition is tacit knowing – it is an unmediated process of pattern recognition and a reconciliation of complexity (internal/external, systems, ideas, histories, etc, etc) that influence future perceptions and actions.

it is direct, instinctive, perceptive – a form of knowledge that can be fiendishly difficult to communicate or validate because of its resistance to analytical metrics or quantitative definitions. which i think emphasizes its importance in how we construct and share knowledge and ideas – we engage in multi-layered communication of which we’re only partly conscious, and our intuition picks up the subtleties as an unending flow of incoming signals, some strong, and some weak.

our discussion was fuelled by vampiros, the house specialty of a little place called paladar, on ludlow south of houston. perfect for fiesty conversations and exuberant autumn evenings.

el vampiro

• tequila
• hibiscus flower  nectar (bought at health food stores, fresh or brewed as tea from the dried flowers)
• ground chili
• salt

mix tequila and nectar, in proportion to evening’s intent.

rim  glass with mixture of chili and salt

enjoy!!