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From Publishing Models to Cognitive Network: How Blockchain and AI Redefines Academic System
Full text linkThis paper aims to analyze technological, economic, ethical, and political dimensions by designing multiple future scenarios and applying backcasting for pathway analysis, thereby Mapping a blockchain and AI-driven academic ecosystem over the next 20 to 200 years. It fills a research gap in the integrated theoretical framework, power evolution studies, and ethical research related to their coexistence.
The primary scenarios are divided into two: power transition (2030-2050) and technological transformation (2030-2200).
The first scenario is set against a backdrop in which traditional publishers’ restrictions on knowledge dissemination triggered the Open Access movement. However, publishers soon capitalized on the movement by imposing high APCs, resulting in a new form of centralized monopoly. This cycle reveals persistent structural power imbalances. The emergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence brings renewed hope. These technologies are seen as potential tools to disrupt entrenched power structures, enabling a shift toward decentralized, co-governed, and transparent academic publishing—ultimately realizing a more authentic form of open access. the author envisions an ideal future in which a decentralized academic community forms the core, while centralized commercial services operate at the periphery as supportive infrastructure.However, the transition to such a system faces significant obstacles—including institutional inertia, resistance from capital interests, and technical barriers. Reflecting on past movements and stakeholder motivations may reveal more pragmatic strategies. One such approach is "parasitic transformation".
The second scenario explores the implications of embodied intelligence and brain-computer interfaces for academia, society, and ethics in 200 years.
Keywords: blockchain, artificial intelligence, decentralized, strategic foresight, publishing, academic, peer review, open access, dao，brain-computer interfac
“Let’s grab a match!”: Exploring ways to enhance engagement and consistency in sports for Gen Z and millennials
Full text linkMotivated by personal experience navigating recreational sports systems in Toronto, this thesis explores how digital design can support sustained recreational sports participation among Gen Z and millennials. Using the Double Diamond methodology and iterative prototyping, the research investigates how principles from behavior change theory, gamification, and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can inform digital interventions to enhance motivation, accessibility, and social engagement in recreational sports. Through a portfolio of four exploratory prototypes including community-building initiatives, motivational gamification strategies, and personalized goal-setting platforms, the project critically examines how UI/UX design can influence initial and ongoing participation. Findings highlight the importance of autonomy, peer support, and playful engagement in sustaining sports motivation, while also revealing the limitations of short-term interventions and the broader structural barriers beyond digital solutions. This research contributes to the growing discourse on digital activation in recreational sports by offering design insights for future tools that seek to support sustained participation through flexible, user-centered, and socially supported experiences
Reimagining End-of-Life Care: Bridging System Gaps in Hospitals and Intensive Care Units (ICUs) to Redesign the Experience of Dying
Full text linkThis Major Research Project explores how end-of-life care in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) can be reimagined to ensure the dying's dignity, autonomy, and emotional well-being. Despite the curative focus of acute hospital care, a significant proportion of patients die in ICUs—often surrounded by invasive technologies, under stress, and without adequate emotional, spiritual, or relational support. The guiding research question asks: How might we redesign the ICU experience to ensure all patients achieve a “good death” that reflects their values, minimizes suffering, and incorporates patient-centered design, spirituality, dignity, and cultural dimensions into the dying process?
Employing a human-centered design and strategic foresight approach, the study draws on qualitative interviews with palliative care physicians, policy advisors, and interdisciplinary practitioners and a survey of loved ones who have firsthand ICU and hospital experience of their loved one’s death.
Methodologies include system mapping, speculative interventions, and thematic analysis. Findings reveal critical gaps in current care, including poor communication, lack of continuity of care, and minimal emotional or cultural support for patients and families.
Participants emphasized the need for earlier integration of palliative care, team-based approaches, and a broader definition of the “patient", including loved ones, spiritual care providers, artists, designers and community. The project offers future-oriented recommendations and calls to action to inform more compassionate, inclusive, and relationally grounded ICU design, reframing the experience of dying as a meaningful part of life, rather than a medical failur
Repatriation, Resurgence, and Reconnection: An Investigation of Collecting and Belonging
Full text linkThis thesis focuses on repatriation, resurgence, and reconnection. In line with Indigenous methodologies of prologuing and story, I employ the auto-ethnographic method to detail my experience of Indigenous identity and investigating my relationship to my father’s Métis heritage. I further engage in the practice of story through qualitative, semi-structured, conversational interviews with two Indigenous arts professionals currently working in the field of repatriation. Through narrative analysis and a critical museological framework, these conversations form the foundations for an exploration into strategies of repatriation and the role stolen cultural belongings play in the collections of galleries, museums, and other heritage organizations.
What emerges from the conjunction of these stories is a treatise on collecting and belonging through the lens of personal and professional functions of return. This research seeks to demystify the practice of repatriation as a one-time, almost bureaucratic occurrence and instead posits it as one tool of relationship building between museums and communities. Similarly, I show how the processes of reconnection and resurgence also struggle to be linear events. Through this combination of auto-ethnography and conversational interviews, I explore how access to or absence of emotional and material expressions of self shape identity through a critique of what collecting practices we engage in as both individuals and institutions
Best Work is 6 Feet Under, Ceremony in the Dirt
Full text linkThe importance of the sacrifices in artistic creation, highlighting the deep emotional and spiritual journey involved reflects on the balance between personal loss and the fulfillment of contributing to others' lives through reflection of journey moccasin bundle making. The exploration of cultural identity, spirituality, and personal growth, guided by ancestral connections and the mentorship of seeking knowledge from outside sources while embracing one's own heritage (Kay Sr., 1980 - 1990) and research preparations (Kovach, 2021, 56 - 57) is profound. An ancient practice symbolizing sacrifice, transformation, and data collection through moccasin bundle makers approach in beadwork uses sources of strength and inspiration in creative endeavors. Through beadwork, and spiritual practices, they express their full identity and affirm their place in the world, guided by the teachings of ancestral knowledge (Walker, 1982, 107). The creative process is a continuous cycle of reflection and opportunities for growth. It navigates a path and ultimately decides what practices will serve the development of spiritual journey moccasin bundles. The journey moccasin bundle maker’s work is a profound intersection of personal and cultural history, spiritual purpose, and emotional resonance, with a commitment to supporting others and honoring traditional practices of beadwork. The exchange is a multifaceted process involving spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional elements, deeply rooted in tradition and respect for ancestral knowledge. It culminates in a meaningful connection between the journey moccasin bundle maker, the journey moccasin bundle, and the journey moccasin bundle keeper (Robertson et al., 2024, 147,figure 7.9)
Towards Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology: A comprehensive framework and evaluation tool
Full text linkNeurotechnology is a rapidly advancing field that enhances our understanding of the brain, consciousness, and complex cognitive functions. While it holds great potential for improving daily life of people with disabilities and reshaping concepts of human-technology integration, it also poses significant risks. Improper use of neurotechnology can harm individuals, raising concerns about identity, autonomy, privacy, and safety. The differentiating line between medical and non-medical neurotechnology is blurred, with the term ‘neurotechnology’ itself remaining loosely defined. The policy initiatives surrounding neurotechnology are still evolving and there are gaps in translating the existing policies into actions or evaluating the progress of the actions in a neurotechnology enterprise.
This major research project explores the policy landscape of neurotechnology through the lens of responsive innovation. The design outcome of this project is a comprehensive framework and evaluation tool for responsible innovation in neurotechnology. The tool is designed for regulatory bodies to evaluate the status or progress of neurotechnology enterprises in responsible innovation. The Responsible Neurotechnology Framework (RNF) has four key components: governance, user, data, and technology. This is foundational in guiding stakeholders to the key areas to focus during the neurotechnology life cycle. The accompanying Responsible Neurotechnology Evaluation Tool (RNET) outlines the actions that are evidence of responsible innovation in the organizational practices of a neurotechnology enterprise. RNET serves as a tool for regulatory bodies to assess the status of responsible innovation within an enterprise and to monitor its progress over time against the four key components of the framework.
By supporting both point-in-time assessment and ongoing progress monitoring, the design artifact helps ensure that neurotechnology innovations align with ethical standards, regulatory expectations, and societal needs.
This project demonstrates how inclusive design can inform the governance of emerging technologies, ensuring that innovation is not only accessible but also ethically grounded, user-centered, and socially accountable
Curatorial Care: The Art of Noticing
Full text linkThis thesis explores the art of noticing as a methodological response to the need for deliberate models of care within curation. Stories of noticing are framed throughout this work as relational in nature, as acts of love and hospitality, as cultivating belonging, as interdependent, as countering indifference, and as a slow process. Noticing is presented as integral to the overall act of curatorial care through which art communities cultivate art institutions. The work turns to theoretical frameworks from Disability Arts and care theorists that support pathways for caring engagement in curation. These methodological explorations are articulated in practice-based examples from Toronto art institutions Workman Arts’ and Tangled Arts + Disability, which includes an interview conducted with Workman Arts. The exhibition, The Art of Noticing (March 28-31, 2025) at Ignite Gallery (East) features the work of artists Michele Anne-Marie Dickson, Naomi Beth Hill, Sophia Kyungwon Kim, and Don Kwan and acts as a case study for this explored methodology of noticing, serving as examples of the materiality of noticing embodied in the artwork and art practices of the four artists
Please… Touch the Grass: An Exhibition of Site-Responsive Sculptures Journeying Between Thresholds of Virtual and Real
Full text linkPlease… Touch the Grass is an exhibition at the OCAD University Graduate Gallery at 205 Richmond St. West of three new sculptures and a site-responsive set of walls dividing the gallery into distinct zones. The exhibition —along with extra–exhibition materials and supporting narratives— explores how reality is constructed between the virtual and physical, the inseparability of the two, and the unseen labour which goes into their construction.
In the first gallery zone are Directional Shielding — three sculptures evoking a cable meandering through the space— and Cutscene 1 — a scattered field of cardboard Nintendo controllers, set down mid-action and indefinitely abandoned by their players. Across the plastic turf threshold in the second zone of the gallery is Joycon Drift — a driftwood log suspended over a polygonal patch of sand, pointing towards the outside.
The artworks combine manufacturing and building materials (cardboard pulp forming, extruded foam insulation, microcrystalline wax) with materials indexical of outdoor leisure (driftwood, turf grass, polymer sand). Together the works’ material and referent choices complicate boundaries of natureculture —Donna Haraway's term for the inextricability of nature and culture. Influenced by contemporary sculpture artists, such as Catherine Telford-Keogh and Lotus Kang, the work is grounded in techniques of material shifting, interplay of referent and abstraction, and manipulating the flow of the gallery space.
Analysis of iterative studio process, objectives, and the artworks themselves are framed by three key texts: Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), and Donna Harraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2016).
The metaphor of grass is considered as a field where bodies in play self–organise, how the lawn presents a boundary space to be negotiated among neighbours, and as grass outfields of city parks representing a zone of co-negotiated social agreements. Subjects of play, labour, outdoor recreation, and digital content consumption are informed by the artists’ memories and lived experiences. Narrative segments throughout the paper further illustrate themes present in the work through the authors’ formative memories of family, the internet and gaming, bumping up against permissions/access, and shifting landscapes
“Echoes in the Void: Nostalgic Morse Codes”
Full text linkThis thesis explores how memories—shaped by social, political, and historical forces
influence our identity and worldview. Growing up under dictatorship, apartheid, and war, my
formative years were marked by fear, stress, and anxiety, alongside moments of joy. Childhood
innocence was replaced by a reality of political instability, leaving little room for autonomy.
These experiences fostered an early understanding of resilience and oppression that has shaped
my adult perspective. By connecting personal trauma with broader collective histories, this
multi-sensory immersive installation seeks to highlight the lasting impact of conflict and
repression on individuals and communities, emphasizing the role of memory in shaping identity
and societal awareness. The work uses several forms to create effects and connect trauma, lived
experiences, and reflections of these things on our historical understanding.
1. Immersive, interactive installation
2. Asemic writing
3. The philosophies of Adorno, Haraway, Bhabha, and Dr. Little Bear
Through a colonial lens: photography, orientalism, and the middle east
Full text linkPhotography has played a pivotal role in constructing and reinforcing Orientalist narratives about the Middle East. This paper investigates how 19th and early 20th-century European photographers, such as Félix Bonfils and Rudolph Carl Huber, contributed to colonial depictions of the region, shaping Western perceptions through staged and stereotypical imagery. Drawing from Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, this study examines how these images framed the Middle East as exotic, timeless, and inferior to the West. In contrast, local photographers like Aqa Reza Akasbashi and Ashraf Os-Saltaneh documented their communities with authenticity, challenging Eurocentric portrayals. By analyzing the contrast between these photographic traditions, this research underscores the role of photography as both a tool of imperial ideology and a medium for cultural self-representation, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of historical and contemporary visual narratives