Events
Recent Events
Peter Jones
Oksana Kachur
Henry Moller
Kate Sellen
Monday, April 30, 2012 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
How can design facilitate better encounters and outcomes for those navigating healthcare systems?
Healthcare systems are institutional and slow to change, yet people are adaptive and respond to culture and technologies. By observing how people seek health betterment and navigate healthcare, designers are able to respond with innovations in service, system and environment. By prioritizing human experience, inclusive design and human-environment interaction, the design community is positioned to...
Roland Harwood
Monday, March 19, 2012 - 6:30pm - 8:00pm
What is Open Innovation and how is it different from traditional innovation? In this interactive session Roland Harwood will share first hand experience and lessons learned regarding technical and cultural challenges of designing and running productive networks and innovation communities, both internally and externally. Roland will describe the rise of open business models and describe how organisations such as LEGO, Procter and Gamble, and Oxfam are embracing a radically more collab-...
Thor Muller
Thursday, November 10, 2011 - 5:45pm - 7:15pm
What can we do if the increasing pace of disruptive change means we can't research, plan or process our way to success? We have to get lucky.
As the sheer volume of information and choices explodes, we're under incredible pressure to connect just in time with the people and ideas we need to thrive. No matter how smart we are, or how big our idea, the world is always bigger. No matter how many of the possibilities we can see, there will always be...
Greg Van Alstyne
Dr. Robert Logan
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
What might our media be like by 2020? How can McLuhan's rich legacy illuminate this question today? Drawing from the year-long 2020 Media Futures project, we will glimpse Canada's media landscape in 2020. At the same time we'll examine McLuhan's approach in light of contemporary strategic foresight methods, finding unexpected contrasts and surprising parallels in dimensions as diverse as art, uncertainty, method, storytelling, strategy, and provocation.
...
Jon Kolko
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 6:00pm - 7:30pm
The process of design appears magical, as designers are able to connect disparate ideas in order to create new and exciting innovations. But design isn't magic - it's a rigorous and methodical process; design synthesis, the act of translation, can be taught and learned. In this talk, Jon Kolko will present the theory, methods, and techniques of design synthesis in an easy to understand format. He'll describe why synthesis works, and provide examples to illustrate the power of a...
Sara Diamond
Patricio Davila
Gabe Sawhney
Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
What is driving the rapid uptake in information and data visualization?
In addition to its clear value for science, is it emerging as a new art medium?
What can this fast-evolving field teach us about reality, truth, and beauty?
Sara Diamond, co-principal investigator of the Centre for Information Visualization and Data-Driven Design (CIV-DDD), will present from her paper ‘Aesthetic Histories and Material Practices: The Limits of Visualization and the Limits of the Real’....
Steve Portigal
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
Lecture - March 8th, 2011, 5:45pm to 7:30pm
Culture is everywhere we look, and (perhaps more importantly) everywhere we don’t look. It informs our work, our purchases, our usage, our expectations, our comfort, and our communications (indeed, if you aren’t familiar with a specific geographic and historical set of experiences, the presumably clever title for this talk will instead be perhaps bland). In this presentation, Steve will explore the ways we can experience, observe, and...
Heather Gold
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
Get a taste of Tummeling at the Lecture on February 16, 2011, 5:45pm to 7:30pm
Everyone wants to be heard and a magical "community" to appear around their talks, business or web site. But most group formation fails and most presentations bore or drive people away on their phones.
The key is to have a tummler to catalyze conversation and connections. Tummeling is a model for managing in a post-hierarchical setting and is a critical skill set that can catalyze a group and...
Dan Saffer
Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." So said Albert Einstein. But how? How can you take complex pieces of functionality, put them all together and make them as simple as possible...without alienating experienced or power users? This talk will outline ways of framing problems, working through concepts, and creating affordances and interface layouts that emphasize and promote simplicity—even with difficult, powerful systems. Creating...
Adrian Ho
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
It's increasingly clear that a company's brand is defined less by its communications or advertising, and more by the things it does; its products or services, and how it treats its customers. Ironically, this increases the importance of marketing and advertising and the role of marketing and advertising agencies, but it calls for a new way of thinking about what we do and how we do it.
Registration: $15 lecture at http://adrainho.eventbrite.com/
Free lecture for OCADU faculty, staff...
Adam Greenfield
Nurri Kim
Thursday, November 11, 2010 - 2:30pm - 5:00pm
Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk, during which we'll be looking for appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.
Visions of networked urbanism tend to live in...
Adam Greenfield
Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - 4:45pm - 7:30pm
In recent years a wide variety of objects and surfaces from everyday life has been reimagined as networked resources for information gathering, processing, storage, and display. Why should cities be any different? What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens? Join Urbanscale’s Adam Greenfield as he explores the real-time, read/write city in fifteen key transitions.
About the...
Bob Logan
Monday, November 1, 2010 - 2:30pm - 5:00pm
How can design thinking inform government policy development leading to a sustainable energy future for Ontario, Canada, and the globe? Bob Logan, sLab Chief Scientist and Physics Prof. Emeritus, University of Toronto, will make a short presentation on this question.
Working in breakout groups we will identify systemic approaches to developing future government energy policies. We’ll reconvene to share results and develop a plan for organizing a research group and other kinds of...
Ben Berkowitz
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
Enabling citizens to participate in local governance and local news through existing institutions and new forces created by the Internet. Our neighborhoods have the ability to change and evolve based on the level of engagement and cooperation of their residents, governments, and supporting news and information providers. Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix.com will talk about how he first became involved with the Open Government movement motivated by frustrations he was having in his hometown of New...
Scott Smith
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
Could we have had the iPhone without Star Trek? Can we create the next innovation without thinking about other possible worlds? What are we making out of our imaginations that will shape what’s next? As an emerging area of thought and practice, Design Fiction provides us with a way of “thinking about doing what we see and imagine.” By making models or prototypes of the future, we expose, test and probe further into it, exploring scenarios as use cases, as they are assumptions...
Howard Rheingold
Saturday, September 25, 2010 - 9:30am - 2:00pm
Veteran technology writer Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs; The Virtual Community) will outline five social media literacies identified in his latest work: attention; participation; collaboration; critical consumption (or ‘crap detection’) and network awareness; and their impact on organizations. Working in groups to we’ll identify issues relevant to business, government and education and collect practical questions on how to apply social media and Smart Mob thinking in our...
Michele Perras
Suzanne Stein
Greg Van Alstyne
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - 6:00pm - 9:00pm
How can 'strategic foresight' – the imaginative and disciplined exploration of possible futures – bring criticality and success to creative media entrepreneurs?
This special sLab Explorations event draws together leading voices from several OCAD-led research communities to engage an audience of young innovators.
Through a 'brief history of the future', Greg Van Alstyne of Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) outlines the origins and current relevance of scenario...
Roger Martin
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
How can we use design to challenge the prevailing wisdom of business education? As Dean of the Rotman School of Management at The University of Toronto, Roger Martin has led a controversial & exciting campaign to do just that. He has famously asserted that “Business people don’t need to understand designers better: they need to be designers.” This is a foundational idea in an emerging area in the theory and practice of business called Design Thinking. In his talk...
Alexander Osterwalder
Monday, April 5, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
Can communities use design to change the way business is done? In his talk Alex will tell the story of how he and his team broke every rule in the publishing industry to create a bestselling management book. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers was co-created by 470 people from forty-five countries, financed through an online community and pre-sales, self-published and distributed globally through Amazon. The book features a highly visual design...
Debera Johnson, Pratt Institute
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 5:45pm - 7:30pm
How can we incubate the future of design education and change the world at the same time? Get an inside look and meet some of the key people and projects that have shaped the success of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation. Both a platform to launch a green business and a design consultancy for world projects, the Incubator offers a unique way to use the power of networks, collaboration and community to get things done. Deb will share the story of Solar Ivy, currently on...
Media Ecology Association Canada
Monday, March 1, 2010 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm
The sLab/MEA Canada media ecology group will meet at 5 pm for networking and dinner and begin the formal meeting at 6 pm ending at 8 pm. The list of invitees includes former members of the McLuhan program, colleagues at OCAD, Students in the MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation and participants in the SmartBook project at the sLab. The group will continue our exploration of media ecology, design, innovation and strategic foresight.
About the Speaker:
The Media Ecology Association (MEA...
Natalie Jeremijenko
Thursday, February 25, 2010 - 3:30pm - 7:30pm
xCAMP is a collaborative design effort that will launch the xCLINIC Project in Toronto. Using a combination of art, social entrepreneurship, and critical making, the project aims at creating a movement for spreading environmental health awareness and action, building on the xCLINIC concept originally developed by Natalie Jeremijenko. There are many opportunities to participate in the xCLINIC project.
You can read more at: http://www.manara.ca/xclinic
If you are interested in registering for...
Natalie Jeremijenko
Thursday, February 25, 2010 - 1:30pm - 3:30pm
What happened at Copenhagen, what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly – what now? Those who expected decisive agreements and large-scale governmental action from the recent Copenhagen negotiations are disappointed. However, now the emphasis falls on other strategies and technological opportunities we face to coordinate environmental movement, raise the standards of evidence and facilitate diverse responses to environmental challenges. How can distributed sensing and public...
Henry Hong-Yiu Cheung, IDEO
Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 5:30pm - 7:30pm
As our world becomes increasingly more interconnected and the frequency of change continues to accelerate, what roles can designers play in this evolving cultural context? How can we shift the perspective of our craft and practice to make broad and meaningful impact with our work? In this talk, IDEO's Henry Cheung will explore the different trajectories of design, design thinking, and the interface between design and other professions.
About the Speaker:
Henry Hong-Yiu Cheung is currently...
David Eaves
Thursday, January 14, 2010 - 6:45pm - 8:45pm
What do NASA engineers, the 911 emergency service and Facebook all have in common? According to David Eaves, they each offer a window into the way public service and policy development will be organized and delivered in the future: more participatory, adaptive and useful to an increasingly tech savvy public. In this talk David will explore what open source methodologies, technology and social shifts mean to the future of the one institution we all rely on: Government.
About the Speaker:
A...
Riel Miller
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - 12:00pm - 2:00pm
How can organizations learn to “rigorously imagine” the future in order to make analytically robust and easily understood links between anticipation and action? Based in Paris, Riel Miller is a leading global strategic foresight designer and practitioner, with more than two decades experience tracking and exploring the emergence of post-industrial Learning Intensive Societies. Pioneer of a range of techniques for building Futures Literacy, Riel co-creates innovation, leadership and...
Nathan Shedroff
Thursday, November 5, 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Is design ready to take its rightful place as an important component of innovation and cultural change? It’s no longer possible to develop successful solutions to cultural or climate problems without integrating people, ideas, and techniques from the Design, Business, and Sustainability domains. But first, we have some reckoning to do with our past...
About the Speaker:
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. He is one of the pioneers...
Chris Messina
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 6:45pm - 8:15pm
As the Web becomes more social, do the same rules apply? Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have received a lot of press as potential “game changers.” They are inching the web away from a document-centric model – where the primary activities are searching and information retrieval from vast databases – to one that is more engaging and people-centric. Chris will discuss the trends and technologies driving this shift, and the potential of the people-centric model...
Delia Grenville, Intel
Friday, October 2, 2009 - 12:30pm - 1:45pm
In this time of unprecedented technological change, how can we leverage our perspective, as designers, researchers, and consumers? How can we enhance our ability to adapt, adopt, and remain receptive to changes in digital media and devices that deliver content into people's homes and lives? Are we evaluating and managing change with meaningful tools? Let's discuss how research methods, analysis, and product definition should adapt to inform product design and innovation in this new era...
Dave Gray
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 - 6:45pm - 8:30pm
How must we change our work practices to thrive in the 21st Century? We’re moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy, where creativity and innovation will be the keys to value. New rules apply. Yet two hundred years of industrial habits are embedded in our workplaces, our schools and our systems of government. For the first time, Dave Gray will share insights from his upcoming book on the work of creativity and innovation, due to be published in the first quarter of 2010.
About...
Dr. Peter Jones
Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - 6:00pm - 9:00pm
The evening will engage participants in discussion of current applications of participatory dialogue as a practice for design thinking and social design action. Peter Jones will present and discuss two related models of "design for human-human interaction", Hugh Dubberly / Paul Pangaro’s Design for Conversation and Jones’ work on Dialogic Design (community site linked). The aim of Dialogic Design is to engage stakeholders of mixed interests and power (think healthcare,...
Lenore Richards
Greg Van Alstyne
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - 2:00pm - 2:45pm
As part of OCAD’s 2009 Fall Orientation Program, Strategic Innovation Lab is holding its first annual presentation on student research opportunities at sLab. Attendees will learn how they can become part of sLab's growing community of design, business and education professionals, and how they can benefit from this involvement, by contributing to the organization of cutting edge design research, exciting public events, and other activities.
Dr. Carlos Scolari
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 3:00pm - 5:00pm
What is an interface? Can interfaces be ‘transparent’? What are the relationships between different interfaces? Do they form a network? Can we apply an ecological model to interface evolution? What are the roles of users and designers in the ecology of interfaces? Interfaces have multiplied, and it is possible to find them not only in the analogical objects (the interface of a TV remote) and digital devices (a videogame interface) that surround us, but also as company-client...
Dr. Carlos Alberto Scolari
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Why and how are narrative worlds expanding across different media and platforms? What are the emerging features of transmedia consumption and production? What do these new forms of storytelling, product and service design and branding tell us about future convergence of culture and technology? Cross-media, multiple platforms, hybrid media, intertextual commodity, transmedial worlds, transmedial interactions, intermedia, multimodality, media convergence… the dictionary is open and we must...
Abigail Disney
Monday, June 15, 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:30pm
How can activism, philanthropy and filmmaking combine to create a platform for sustainable and constructive social innovation? Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the extraordinary story of a small band of Liberian women who came together in the midst of a bloody civil war, took on the violent warlords and corrupt Charles Taylor regime, and won a long-awaited peace for their shattered country in 2003. After a screening of this important film,Ms. Disney will talk about the work of the film, its...
Gong Szeto
Thursday, May 7, 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
What implications does the current global economic crisis have for design? For Gong Szeto the answers lie in understanding how design has evolved over the last hundred years in parallel with capitalism. Billionaire Warren Buffett has called financial derivatives “weapons of mass destruction.” Gong Szeto will demonstrate the powerful properties and dynamics of derivatives in the financial world, and apply this framework to understanding design’s origins and future possibilities...
Karen Stephenson
Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:30pm
How can we accelerate healthy organizational change? For renowned social network theorist and corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson, the answer lies in how we define “membership” in today’s globally connected culture.
The nature of organization lies in its barrier to entry: in how "membership" is defined. This is the raison d'être of organizational culture. This disheartening social fact is all the more lamentable in today's globally...
Saul Kaplan
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Do organizations continually need to explore, test and experiment with new business models, in the same way they do with new products and technologies today? Saul Kaplan of Business Innovation Factory says they do. For Kaplan the barrier to delivering better value isn’t technology. Humans and our institutions—both stubbornly resistant to change—impede our ability to network people, resources, and capabilities across organizations. Kaplan calls for a safe, manageable...
Larry Keeley, Doblin
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Are there proven methods for creating the future? With high stakes and higher rates of failure, how do innovation efforts improve their odds? What are the core problems of innovation and who is most competent to solve them? While many have advocated approaches to innovation that highlight creativity and imagination, brainstorming and "outside the box" thinking, there has been a quiet minority who have argued that innovation must be crafted into a legitimate discipline. Successful...
Scott Thomas
Rahaf Harfoush
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Were the progressive tendencies seen in the campaign flash-in-the-pan phenomena or do they represent a kind of sea change in technologies of engagement? Scott Thomas and Rahaf Harfoush lead an interactive discussion on how design and new media played an instrumental role in the Barack Obama campaign. Thomas and Harfoush explore innovation in both campaign tactics and political strategy. In conversation, we explore the impact of many forms of openness on participation in the 2008 presidential...
