OCAD U students win five Futurist awards

l-r: Jaime Rivera, Neil Botelho, Bo Louie, Nadia Abuseif and Silva Nercessian
Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am

OCAD University congratulates its graduate Strategic Foresight and Innovation students with winning five awards presented by The Association of Professional Futurists (APF) for their outstanding work! The APF is a global community of futurists, dedicated to promoting professional excellence and demonstrating the value of strategic foresight and futures studies for their clients and/ or employers.

The APF developed the competition to recognize exceptional work by students in future studies. The 2019 Student Recognition Award winners include: 

  • Rachelle Bugeaud – 2nd Place Masters Individual Awards
  • Lindsay Clarke, Jessica Thornton, Ayana Webb – 1st Place Masters Group Awards
  • Kate Gaffigan, Lucy Gao, Maryam Mohamedali, Ali Shamaee – 2nd Place Masters Group Awards
  • Jenny Hwang, Nicole Norris, Tamara Daniel, Lisa Hart, Christine Martin - 3rd Place Masters Group Awards
  • Nadia Abuseif, Neil Botelho, Silva Nercessian, Jaime Rivera, Bo Louie Sui – 1st Place Masters Alternative Media Group Awards

OCAD U's Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (MDes) develops students’ expertise in foresight, research and innovation methodologies, enabling them to acquire sufficient contextual knowledge to develop intelligent, innovative, visionary and future-enhancing solutions in their culminating projects.

SFI Students at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium 7 (RSD7) Turin, Italy

SFI students Ariana Lutterman and Tara Campbell with their poster Designing Designers: A critical look at design education
SFI student Adam Oliveira presenting his poster Interstellar: “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before” which he prepared with
SFI students Nadia Abuseif, Nicole Norris, and Jen Wilson-Lee presenting their poster Flourishing Cybernetics: A Biomimetics Pos
Thursday, November 22, 2018

By Ariana Lutterman and Tara Campbell

The Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium (RSD) is an annual international gathering of academics, researchers, and practitioners engaged in systemic design, a discipline that brings together systems thinking and systems-oriented design. This year, the seventh RSD took place in Turin, Italy from October 24-26th to explore the theme of “Challenging Complexity by Systemic Design Towards Sustainability”.

RSD is convened by the Systemic Design Association, co-founded by Dr. Peter Jones, an associate professor in the Faculty of Design here at OCAD, where he teaches in two graduate programs: Strategic Foresight and Innovation, and Design for Health. Both of these programs have courses in systemic design. As part of these courses, students create maps that visually illustrate complex topics, unpacking relationships, histories, and layers of a system in a way that can be more easily understood and digested. The symposium included a track for these visual maps specifically, and several OCAD student groups submitted and had their maps accepted to be presented in the RSD7 gallery.

The conference itself began with a day of workshops covering topics ranging from the idea of place in systemic design to connected products and the circular economy. The following days were broken down into parallel presentation sessions for participants to choose from based on different themes within systemic design. These were punctuated by keynote presentations from systems thinkers whose backgrounds spanned public policy, ecology, economics, farming, and architecture - a representation of the diverse voices needed across disciplines to truly think systemically. A number of OCAD faculty, Peter Jones, Greg Van Alstyne, and Michele Mastroeni, presented their work relating to systemic design. Students and alumni from Strategic Foresight and Innovation and Design for Health also presented work, including the aforementioned posters in the Visualization of Complex Systems exhibit, as well as paper presentations.

After the conference, participants were given the opportunity to attend a “de-conference” in the nearby alpine village of Ostana. Here, RSD members who founded the MonViso Institute brought attendees to visit their mountain laboratory, a community they are constructing using systemic design principles. Participants visited the buildings being constructed through net-positive, sustainable, cradle-to-cradle construction and shared meals sourced from local, seasonal ingredients produced with an emphasis on permaculture.

Overall, OCAD had a large presence at this year’s symposium, a tradition that will hopefully be continued at RSD8 next year in Chicago.

Strategic Foresight and Innovation: Foresight Studio: Designed Futures

Strategic Foresight and Innovation
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - 12:30pm to 4:30pm

Foresight Studio Designed Futures

This semester the Winter class of the Foresight Studio have been exploring the Futures of Food Waste. On April 10th, from 12:30-4:30, five groups will present their Designed Futures - experiential and tangible explorations in the futures they have created.

Presentations will be 20 mins long followed by 15 mins for discussion. We’ll be kicking things off at sLab at 12:30 and will move to rooms 318, 510, 511, 514, and 301 for subsequent presentations.

We invite you to join us for some or all of what promise to be thought provoking presentations.

 

Schedule for Designed Futures Presentations:

12:30 PM: sLab, RHA 410: Welcome and introduction

12:40 PM: RHA 318: Group 1 (KALM Consulting) – Presentation

1:00 PM: RHA 318 Group 1 (KALM Consulting) – Discussion/Critique

1:10 PM: Transfer to next location

1:15 PM: RHA 510: Group 2  – Presentation

1:35 PM: RHA 510: Group 2 – Discussion/Critique

1:50 PM: Break

2:05 PM: RHA 511: Group 3 – Presentation

2:25 PM: RHA 511: Group 3 – Discussion/Critique

2:35 PM: Transfer to next location

2:40 PM: RHA 514: Group 4 – Presentation

3:00 PM: RHA 514: Group 4 – Discussion/Critique

3:15 PM: Transfer to next location

3:20 PM: RHA 301: Group 5 – Presentation

3:40 PM: RHA 301: Group 5 - Discussion/Critique

3:55 PM: sLab, RHA 410: Plenary Discussion

4:30 PM: End

 

           

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University 205 Richmond RHA Various Rooms
Cost: 
Free

Strategic Foresight and Innovation Students Ranked #1!

Winning Team Fleet with industry leaders and Hult Prize competition at OCAD U Judges
Bo Siu (top left) is a first year Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes student and they spearheaded the program as selected c
Saturday, December 9, 2017 - 9:00am

The Hult Prize Foundation is the largest crowdsourcing platform and startup accelerator for emerging social entrepreneurs from universities around the globe. The annual Hult Prize competition aims to build and launch the most captivating social business solution for the most challenging problem impacting billions every day.

A group of changemakers from the Strategic Foresight and Innovation  MDes program participated in a quarterfinal round of the Hult Prize competition at OCAD University on December 9, 2017. Four core teams successfully pitched a scalable, sustainable, human-centered design solution to address the challenge of harnessesing the power of energy to transform the lives of 10 million people by 2025.

Congratulations to Team Fleet for ranking #1! Rachna Kumar, Lucy Gao, and Juan-Carlos Sandoval can pursue the opportunity to fast-track to a regional semi-final round and join the top 50 finalists world-wide by next March. The United Nations Headquarters host the 2018 Global Finals in September to award a winning team with 1 Million USD in seed capital plus mentorship from a renowned business network.

Team Fleet was placed at the top by an esteemed panel of judges and benefactors; Anna Dewar Gully is Founder and Chief Strategist of Women Strategy, Giovanni Marsico is Founder and President of Archangel Academy, and Katherine Roos is Founder and Executive Director of The Imagination Catalyst. Panel members had a special presence as social innovators with progressive values, significant entrepreneurship and scaling credentials.

The Hult Prize Quarterfinal Competition at OCAD University is an extracurricular non-profit student-led social entrepreneurship program. See more on Facebook!

Photo Credit: Krystle Merrow

News Story: Bo Siu

New WFSF foresight publication with art direction by SFI Alumna Kelly Kornet

Human Futures Publication Cover
Thursday, January 5, 2017

The World Futures Studies Federation has just released the first edition of its new publication, Human Futures, with art direction by SFI alumna Kelly Kornet. Each issue will be loosely themed, with the first issue featuring some exciting and innovative futures work by several WFSF members.

Scroll to the embedded magazine and click expand to read online: 

https://www.wfsf.org/communications/wfsf-magazines.

xFutures: Understanding Change. Leading Innovation.

xFutures Exhibition poster
Thursday, May 26, 2016 - 4:00pm to Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 10:00pm

Join us at the third xFutures exhibit, featuring the work of the students from the Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI).  Special focus will be placed on our graduating students and several of them will present their Major Research Projects in a Pecha Kucha presentation.

Opening reception on Thursday, May 26, 2016 - 6 to 9 p.m.

Venue & Address: 
49 McCaul Street
Website: 
http://www.ocadu.ca/sfi
Cost: 
Free
xFutures Exhibition poster

xFutures Exhibit

Thursday, May 26, 2016 - 10:00pm to Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 9:00pm

We are delighted to invite you to the opening of our third xFutures exhibit, featuring the work of the students from the Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI).  Special focus will be placed on our graduating students and several of them will present their Major Research Projects in a Pecha Kucha presentation.

I hope you can join us on Thursday May 26 from 6 – 9 pm at OCAD U’s 49 McCaul The exhibit continues until June 9.

Venue & Address: 
49 McCaul Street
xFutures poster with event info

OCAD University teams competing for $1 million Hult Prize

Photo of Team Zero members
Photo of Team Jade members
Friday, February 26, 2016 - 5:00am

Two teams from OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program will soon travel to regional rounds of competition for the $1 million Hult Prize. The prize awards the best social enterprise that can double ten million people’s income by the year 2020.

Team members in the Jade Initiative, Courtney Cooper, Vincent Galante, Ziyan Hossain and Lisa Hart, are heading to Shanghai to pitch their idea to leverage the value of trash to create meaningful jobs and clean cities in the developing world. The city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example, has 100,000 people who make their living as waste-pickers. The Jade Initiative would take these people out of the dump and create franchise opportunities and networks for entrepreneurs around recycling collection, on-demand junk removal and waste aggregation services.

OCAD U’s second group, Team Zero, is travelling to the regional competition in Boston. Calla Lee, Melissa Tullio and Christine McGlade will be pitching their idea to manage food waste. The idea would employ women in developing countries to collect food waste from restaurants, compost it and then sell it to urban farmers as fertilizer. Most megacities in developing countries don’t have any municipal compost collection.

The Hult Prize regional competitions are happening March 11 and 12.

 

SFI Faculty Member outlines the potential of Experiential Futures practice in The Economist

Strategic Foresign and Innovation
Friday, December 18, 2015 - 5:00am

Professor Stuart Candy's article in The Economist's annual print/app/online look at the year ahead, "The World in 2016", outlines the potential of Experiential Futures practice for enabling public imagination and foresight in organisations, as well as in the wider culture.

http://www.theworldin.com/article/10511/show-and-tell

SFI Alumn Featured in Huffington Post

Strategic Foresight and Innovation
Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 5:00am

Madeleine Ashby, graduate of the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (MDes 2011), was recently featured in the Arts and Culture section of the Huffington Post.

Her short story (a spinoff of her Master's thesis), “By the Time We Get to Arizona,” published last year in Hieroglyph, a science fiction collection, was highlighted as an example of solution-oriented science fiction.

Read the article here: http://huff.to/1HtMTKW
Read Madeleine's MRP here: http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/104
More about the SFI Program: www.ocadu.ca/sfi

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