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

Guest Speaker and workshop with Aldo de Jong: "The Future of Mobility"

Singapore LTA
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - 6:30pm

Co-creating services for the future of mobility
After an intro presentation on the future of mobility, Aldo will facilitate an interactive session with participants to explore and co-create services to enable future of urban mobility. By combining their understanding of human needs from their ethnographic research in Australia and Singapore and mapping out global emerging value propositions, Claro has identified key opportunity spaces for new services. These will serve as inputs to inspire participants to co-create in small teams innovative products and services for the future mobility landscape.

Aldo de Jong, co-founder of Claro Partners

Together with Rich Radka, Aldo founded Claro Partners in Barcelona 2010. Recently Aldo moved to Toronto, to set up their second hub, at the Centre for Social Innovation. Aldo helps corporations and startups to design services and business models in the context of disruptive shifts. Over the years he has lead deep ethnographic and business expoloration initiatives about the deep shifts that create whole new opportunity landscapes, such as the personal data economy, the internet of things and people, FinTech, the digital customer, from ownership to access, microbusiness, urban mobility and networked business models. Aldo is a strategist with strong analytical capability and business acumen, coupled with creativity and passion for understanding people. He understands what it takes to take an initiative through the organization to the marketplace. He focuses on working with leaders in industries affected by disruption, like media, telecoms, technology and financial services and with disruptive start-ups. Prior to founding Claro, he brought Smart Design to Europe and worked at General Electric. Aldo also co-founded the leading accelerator program Startupbootcamp IoT & Data in Barcelona in 2013. He holds an MSc in engineering from Delft and MBA from IESE. 

Venue & Address: 
sLab 4th Floor, 205 Richmond St. W.
Email: 
gradstudies@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
Free!

"The Last Days of Reality" talk & Q/A with guest speaker Mark Pesce

Balloon Dog
Monday, October 30, 2017 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

On the 3rd of October, Snapchat released an augmented reality ‘collaboration’ with artist Jeff Koons. Plopped in the middle of New York’s Central Park, Balloon Dog heralded a new form of presentation - and appropriation. Within 24 hours, artist Sebastian Errazuriz had ‘tagged’ the work (again, entirely virtually), in a “symbolic stance against imminent AR corporate invasion.”

That invasion is already here, marking ‘The Last Days of Reality’, when the boundaries between authentic and manipulated experience collapse into a newly-emerging ‘post-real’ era. What are the rules of the post-real? Who controls our senses - and, by extension, what we think and believe? What other sorts of interventions, appropriations and responses would undermine this latest assault of public space?

Bio

Mark Pesce is an inventor, author, educator, broadcaster and entrepreneur.  In 1991 he founded pioneering consumer VR startup Ono-Sendai, inventing a orientation sensor (US Patent 5,526,022) licensed to Sega Corporation for Virtua VR. In 1994, Pesce co-invented the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the standard for interactive 3D graphics on the Web, and went on to found BlitCom, delivering streaming VRML entertainment into the browser. Last year Pesce announced plans for the Mixed Realtiy Service (mixedrealitysystem.org), an open-source Internet-scale system to arbitrate and annotate augmented realities. Pesce founded postgraduate programs at both University of Southern California’s Lucas School of Cinematic Arts, and the Australian Film, Television & Radio School. He currently holds appointments as Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and Honorary Adjunct at the Animal Logic Academy of the University of Technology, Sydney. Pesce writes fortnightly a column for The Register, and hosts podcast The Next Billion Seconds.

Presented by the CFC Media Lab, Strategic Foresight & Innovation & Digital Futures Graduate Programs

 

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University 205 Richmond St. W. 410 sLab
Email: 
gradstudies@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
Free
Presented by:

What is Foresight? Video Series

Policy Horizons Canada commissioned a series of short videos on the subject "What is Foresight?" that have been conceived, authored and co-produced by Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), together with students from OCAD University's Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) and Graphic Design programs.

Produced in English and French versions, and fully captioned for inclusive accessibility (AODA-compliant), the work is co-directed by sLab's Director of Research, Greg Van Alstyne and SFI graduate, Zan Chandler. The production team is rounded out by OCAD U undergrad research assistants Alex Appugliesi and Jazeen Hollings, who developed original visual sequences and edited the video.

The video is composed in the form of three short segments approximately 2-1/2 minutes each which may be viewed back to back or separately.

In English: 
What is foresight?
Why use foresight?
Horizons' Foresight Process

En français:
Prospective: ce que cest? 
Le processus d'Horizons de politiques
Le Processus d'Horizons de politiques

For more information, please visit http://slab.ocadu.ca/project/what-is-foresight-video-series.

 

Monday, October 23, 2017 - 1:15pm

sBook: Futures of the Book

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

sLab's vision goes beyond the limited model of most existing ebook systems (such as Amazon’s Kindle) by fully supporting annotating, quoting, comparing, searching, taking notes, and sharing, a process which may be described as “active reading” and which many commentators view as the threshold that must be met for the support of true knowledge work rather than simple leisure reading [Golovchinsky 2008, Sellen and Harper 2002]. sLab claims that emerging digital text infrastructures (search and retrieval systems, social media) are increasingly good at facilitating collective and institutional textual practices such as citing, referencing, curating, publishing, managing, etc. However, they are not very good at facilitating personal textual practices such as highlighting, commenting, annotating, etc. This bias stands in contrast to that of paper texts, which facilitate personal practices while making social and institutional ones more complex.

A number of competing systems, open and proprietary, exist for sorting, delivering and engaging with texts. The focus of this project will be to explore why, when and how these solutions need to inter-operate, and to develop new pathways, 'middleware', and interface technologies that assist in connecting the pieces and experiences together. The first design task is to create a framework that maps and relates emerging standards, systems, and devices, working together and with external partner organizations to create innovative bridging of digital and paper text solutions.

Following from this phase will be the development of prototype displays, applications, and devices that seek to make use of and extend this framework, calling attention to the advantages of an open, shared and accessible infrastructure. In addition to these human experiential benefits, the sBook framework seeks to foster significant advances in sustainability by developing expectations and business models for print-on-demand, reducing needless inventory. The development of the sBook framework starts from three specific attributes of reading we see as important and in need of critical attention and material support:

  • Reading occurs in a variety of spaces, places and at different times
  • Reading is social practice that involves other people, collectives, and institutions
  • Reading is an active process in the productive trajectory of intellectual work (that might include thinking, writing, making, linking, etc) rather than a passive process of consumption.

Given these precepts, the sBook framework is oriented towards conserving the valuable aspects of both digital and paper-based text. It is obvious that current text solutions foster and develop these aspects of reading to different degrees -- and for different reasons. Digital text solutions make personal rather than institutional distribution of texts more possible, but are currently limited in order to maintain traditional economic models of publishing. Ebook software standards and devices make markup and highlighting of text (important aspects of active reading) difficult, whereas paper copies encourage these practices. Key to our understanding of these issues is that they involve material and technical development as well as institutional change. The sBook framework does not discriminate between social, organizational, and technical development – it shall encompass all of these.

 

For more information, please visit http://slab.ocadu.ca/project/sbook-futures-of-the-book.

 

NCE logo

Advisor: 
Sponsor(s): 
Friday, October 20, 2017 - 12:30pm

UNCERTAIN FUTURES Conference

Friday, October 27, 2017 - 8:00am to Sunday, October 29, 2017 - 1:00pm

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes that “the future, in fiction, is a metaphor.” In uncertain times, we look to the future as a blank screen for projecting our anxieties about the fraught present and unresolved past. Our fantasies about the future reveal the ideological constructs of our contemporary moment. “Science fiction is not predictive,” Le Guin writes. “It is descriptive.”

What does the future look like for Americans and observers of American culture in the 21st century? How have past Americans used the future to address lingering uncertainties about their own eras? In an age of fractured politics, environmental devastation, neoliberal innovation, and deadly imperialism, what hope can the future hold? And what can American Studies hope to teach us about the role of uncertainty and futurity in our daily lives?

This event is free and open to the public.

 

For more information, visit: https://uncertainfutures2017.wordpress.com/

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University
Website: 
https://uncertainfutures2017.wordpress.com/
Email: 
rbullen@faculty.ocadu.ca
Cost: 
All panels, presentations, screenings, and plenary speakers are open to the public. To participate/present: $175 for full-time faculty ($220 after September 1st, 2017) $90 for students, part-time faculty, postdocs, and independent scholars/artists ($135 after September 1st, 2017)
Uncertain Futures

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.

Strategic Foresight and Innovation teams sweep Association of Professional Futurists awards

Image of card game called the thing from the future
Friday, July 31, 2015 - 4:00am

SFI students and faculty received high praise at the Association of Professional Futurists awards in San Francisco in July. OCAD University’s teams picked up awards in four categories:

Most Significant Futures Works

Advancing methods and practice:

"The Thing from the Future" (game) Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, Situation Lab

Illuminating futures through artistic work:

"Byologyc/Zed.to" (cross-platform) Trevor Haldenby and The Mission Business

Student Awards

Graduate team project, 1st place:

"The Futures of Democracy" (Foresight Studio report) Chris Connolly, Laura Dempsey, Ron Memmel, Amy Satterthwaite and Jill Sharrock

Alternative media, 1st place:

"The Next Familiar" (Major Research Project) Karen Maxwell and Shannah Segal

SFI graduate Kelly Kornet was also nominated for the final Most Significant Futures Works category (analysing a significant future issue) for her MRP exhibit "Causing an Effect.”

This follows last year's success when SFI teams placed first and second in the Student Awards.

The Association of Professional Futurists is an international community of professional futurists dedicated to promoting professional excellence and demonstrating the value of futures thinking.

"This is the second year in a row that the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program has picked up top honours," said SFI Assistant Professor and OCADU Situation Lab director Stuart Candy. "We as faculty and our students have been working to make some real contributions to the field where foresight and design intersect, both in the classroom and beyond. It is wonderful to have those contributions recognised by our colleagues in the professional futures community."

Black Future Month 3015

Black poster with pixelated text and artists' names in blue below
Sunday, February 22, 2015 - 5:00am to Friday, March 6, 2015 - 5:00am

3rd Annual Afrofuturism Exhibition – 3015 A collective look into our distant future

The Black Future Month 3015 exhibition is a platform for artists who identify as black to explore the infinite expressions of Afrofuturism and other expansive themes like black identify and existence in the future.

Featuring: Danilo McCallum, Kanyika Yorke, Quentin "Babatunde" Vercetty, Dainsha Nugent, Aaron Jones, Nodinamaad, Stephen Surlin, Dheeko Kinte, Curtia Wright, Chris Ak, MuXubo Mohamed, SoTeeOh, Ola Ojo, Javid JAH, Ekow Nimako, Komi Olaf 

Opening Reception: Sunday, February 22, 3015, 6 to 10 p.m.

Curated by OCAD U alumnus Danilo McCallum as part of Black History Month at OCAD U.

Afrofuturism Discussion Panel and Performances: Orbiting Around Women in Afrofuturism

Friday, February 27, 3015, 5 to 6:30 p.m., Central Hall, Room 230

Moderator: Camille Isaacs

Panelists: Camille Turner (Futuristic artist and author), Asia Clarke (Innovative fashion and jewellery designer), Saidah Baba Talibah (Avant-garde Music artist)

Performers: Faduma Mohamed, Ohm, Sharrae Lyon 

#BFM3015 #BlackFutureMonth

The event is being sponsored by the President's Office, Office of the Vice-President, Academic, Office of Diversity, Equity & Sustainability Initiatives, Faculty of Art, Faclty of Design, Faculty of LAS/SIS, Indigenous Visual Culture, Research & Graduate Studies and the Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University 100 McCaul Street Lobby (Main Entrance) and Transit Space (2nd Floor)
Website: 
http://www.facebook.com/events/1400665453570250/
Email: 
blackfuture3015@gmail.com

OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab to lead major foresight project '2020 Media Futures'

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - 8:00pm

(Toronto — February 16, 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.

2020 Media Futures builds on OCAD’s demonstrated capacity undertaking industry-driven research through consortia such as CONCERT and the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC),” explained OCAD President Sara Diamond. “OCAD’s sLab is uniquely positioned to lever our community’s strengths to support research, commercialization and economic development within the entertainment, screen-based and creative industries, including design, services, technology, infrastructure and policy.”

“sLab is delighted to have this opportunity to lead the development of a shared future vision for the media and entertainment industries in Ontario,” said Lenore Richards, Director of sLab. “In this unprecedented project, initiated and shaped through a close collaboration among Communitech, Nordicity and sLab, we will draw on distinct and diverse capabilities within our own communities and from across the Creative Cluster throughout the foresight scenario process. Unique to this project will be the active participation of graduate students in OCAD’s Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, a groundbreaking new program and the first of its kind in Canada.”

Strategic foresight is a systematic approach to gathering intelligence about possible futures, and building a high quality forward view aimed at guiding and enabling present-day decisions. 2020 Media Futures will investigate several key areas of inquiry, including media convergence, consumer choice, distribution channels, distinctions between producers and consumers, interactivity, and the integration of technologies.

“sLab develops design thinking, business insight, and strategic foresight through an open, informed, imaginative and disciplined process,” said Greg Van Alstyne, Director of Research at sLab, and project leader for 2020 Media Futures. “Our aim is to help Ontario’s creative companies and industries ‘future-proof’ themselves, preparing for rich opportunities and unexpected threats brought on by the rapid evolution of media.”

The project aims to build upon previous foresight programs undertaken around the world, but within an Ontario-specific context. The resulting research from 2020 Media Futures will be made available in an open, publicly accessible forum with the goal that the project’s findings will help significantly build capacity and provide early-stage recognition and support for innovative products, services, platforms, and business models.

BACKGROUNDER:

2020 Media Futures Partners:
Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP)
Achilles Media
Corus Entertainment
Breakthrough Films and Television
GestureTek
GlassBOX Television
Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment
Marblemedia
National Film Board of Canada
Nordicity Group
Ontario Centres of Excellence
Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD)
Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
York University

About Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab)
Strategic Innovation Lab (slab.ocad.ca) is a centre for research in design, strategic foresight and innovation at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD). sLab integrates academic investigation, professional engagement, education and skills development for private, public, and not-for-profit stakeholders. sLab is a growing community of researchers and practitioners, design and business professionals, teachers and students, who are passionate about envisioning possible futures.

About the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD)
The Ontario College of Art & Design (www.ocad.ca) is Canada’s “university of the imagination.” OCAD is dedicated to art and design education, practice and research and to knowledge and invention across a wide range of disciplines. The university is building on its traditional, studio-based strengths, adding new approaches to learning that champion cross-disciplinarity, collaboration and the integration of emerging technologies. In the Age of Imagination, OCAD community members will be uniquely qualified to act as catalysts for the next advances in culture, technology and quality of life for all Canadians.
 

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For more information and images please contact:

 

Sarah Mulholland, Media & Communications Officer, OCAD416.977.6000 Ext. 327 (mobile Ext. 1327)

 

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