Research

Overview

Strategic Innovation Lab investigates the intersections of human behaviour, new technologies and organizational capacities.

sLab develops and applies strategic foresight, design research, visualization and prototyping methodologies in order to clarify and feed the front end of the innovation process. From our base within Canada’s largest and oldest university of art and design, we combine deep experience in creative ideation, design thinking and practice with skills in interdisciplinary collaboration, business analysis and strategic planning. sLab's research program is underwritten by base institutional support, proceeds from professional engagement, research grants, and participation by faculty, students and community representatives. Outcomes include papers and reports for industry and academic publication, participatory workshops, proprietary deliverables, and commercialization initiatives in collaboration with industry partners.

Themes and Priorities

Our research program is currently organized around possible futures in the following interrelated realms:

Education Futures — Visualization, Collaboration, Play
Media Futures — 2020 Media Futures; sBook: Cross Platform Reading, Writing, Publishing
Design Futures — Designing for Emergence
Sustainable Futures — Greening My Hotel
Work Futures — Unfinished Business

sLab's research program is underwritten by base institutional support, research grants, research commissions, and participation by faculty, students and community representatives. Current and planned outcomes include articles for industry and academic publication, industry and community workshops, position papers, reports, proprietary deliverables, and commercialization initiatives in collaboration with industry partners.

sLab Approach and Priorities

Design thinking — Human-centred problem finding, problem framing and problem solving
Creative insight — Leading to innovative strategies, platforms, policies, systems
Strategic foresight — Thinking about, debating, planning, shaping the future
STEEPV analysis — Social, technological, economic, ecological, political & values signals
Understanding impacts — Key to our guiding philosophy

2020 Media Futures

OCAD Press Release

OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab to lead

major foresight project ‘2020 Media Futures’

(Toronto—February 11, 2010) The Ontario College of Art & Design’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) today announced it will lead a multidisciplinary strategic foresight project called 2020 Media Futures: Strategic Foresight for Ontario’s Cultural Media Industries, designed to understand and envision what media may look like by the year 2020 – what kind of cross-platform internet environment may shape media and entertainment in the coming decade and how Ontario firms can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, 14-month long foresight project bringing together researchers, creators, policymakers and other professionals representing the cultural and digital media industries. A significant grant of $132,500 has been provided by the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) through the Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund. Additional support will be provided by key industry partners and OCAD, bringing the total value of the project to $226,500.

Publications

We provide access to research publications and working papers from sLab members and OCAD graduate students, most of which are available under a Creative Commons license for download and circulation. In addition, books, journal articles and online papers published by members of the extended sLab community are listed and available with the constraints of their publishers. To inquire about publication, please contact us.

Books

Research Papers

Working Papers

sBook: Cross Platform Reading, Writing, Publishing

“The future is conversational: when there's more good stuff that you know about that's one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it's not enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. Conversation, not content, is king.”
--Cory Doctorow 2006

A Cambrian explosion of electronic book (ebook) forms is underway, offering new software, hardware, appliances, and devices that seek to supplant print. Clearly the process and experience of writing, publishing and reading a book in the 2000 year-old codex form, while far from obsolete, is ripe for evolutionary enhancement. Meanwhile our reading and writing behaviours are undergoing demonstrable, dramatic transformation, and while the precise causes are being debated [Carr 2008, Kelly 2008, Wolf 2007], all signs point to the penetration of digital media into every corner of intellectual life.

The goals of the sBook project are to develop a unifying information architectural framework for readers, writers and publishers that ties together emerging standards; and to invent new forms of functionality and interoperability to achieve our design vision. The name “sBook” refers to the qualities of the intended experience:

Simple: the pleasure and beauty of human readable pages
Social: developing context and community through social media tools
Searchable: the power and practicality of electronic text
Smart: intelligent recommendations both within and beyond the work
Sustainable: effective use of material and energy throughout the lifecycle
Synchronized: can be updated by author and publisher
Scalable: open platform supporting new products, services, experiences