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Forced Migration: Ghosts of Familial Memory
Get PDFIn Forced Migration: Ghosts of Familial Memory, I create a haunted archive through
performance and recorded conversations with my mother and grandfather. Our conversations
focus on my ancestors’ forced migration to Canada as children in the late Nineteenth and early
Twentieth centuries. Beginning in 1618, the United Kingdom shipped as many as 150,000
children to the colonies; I create a haunted archive of sound recordings to tell stories of my
ancestors’ migrations – Joseph Hart, Louisa Hart, and Eleanor Copeland – while tracing the
impact of these stories through my own embodied and performative response. Performances are
recorded using video and still photography, and my mother and grandfather’s stories are
accentuated through collected sound. This haunted archive contends with the official adoption
records of my ancestors’ migration by highlighting the storytelling voices of my mother and
grandfather. My archive lives in a website which pairs performance documentation with audio
recordings. I use queer and hauntological theory to reflect on my experience as a haunted
archivist in the creation of a sound and performative archive
Online Shopping and Web-Accessibility: Strategies to Ensure Equal Access to Blind Users in E-commerce Platforms
Get PDFOnline shopping has become vastly popular and is easily accessible to people worldwide. Considering the accessibility criteria, many brands are yet to incorporate it into their online interfaces. Most brands have been following the trend of creating beautiful and appealing web layouts that are usable but not accessible to everyone.
Most visually impaired Internet users rely on assistive devices such as screen readers or magnifiers to make websites readable and usable (Herndon, 2019). Despite having accessibility guidelines for over a decade, disabled users still have problems using websites because of how the content is put out (Information Architecture). We as designers have a limited understanding of the challenges that blind users face while accessing the internet. Following my REB (Research Ethics Board) approval (#2022-05), participants were recruited and interviewed to help identify a list of issues they encounter while shopping online, which would then help in developing visual interface design solutions. The WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) rules would be assessed to address the accessibility issues raised, and new adjustments would be proposed to improve the existing guidelines regarding user experience and interface design
Walking Near Water: my relations with (through) land
Get PDFI am a metalsmith; an artist whose practice is grounded in materials and making, and on the generational connections of my Scots/English-Canadian family to the Tkaranto waterfront and the Wonscotonach1 and Cobechenonk2 watersheds.
I am re-thinking my relations with these lands, using a research-creation methodology that walks between two rows: one of craft knowledge founded on European traditions of design and making, and one influenced by Indigenous ways of knowing that are rooted in this place.
Each row reveres reciprocal knowledge-sharing that is embedded in materiality and community – cultures of making and visiting. With that in mind, I have re-framed autobiographical narratives of remembrance in works that combine metalsmithing techniques with materials gathered from local sites meaningful to me and my family. Through these works, I imagine new associations between the rows and reconfigured relationships with the land and water where I live with many others, human and non-human
Resilient Cartographies: A Systems Analysis of Resilience Among Indian Women Immigrants in Canada
Get PDFMost of Canada’s population growth is driven by immigration. In 2020, over 80% of Canada’s population growth came from immigration, with more than half of this number being economic immigrants admitted primarily to meet labour-market shortages. Among these, the incoming numbers from India have been the highest. This number is likely to grow in the coming years as the government calibrates immigration policies to meet its economic (labour-market), political (nation-building), and social (demographic) objectives. Moreover, from an individual perspective, it is clear that many are choosing Canada as their choice of immigration destination over other countries.
Given this context, the study looks at individual immigration journeys of women and acts of resilience within them through a human-centered systems focus. Immigration is a journey of change and uncertainty. Immigrant women from India adapt to vast amounts of changes, losses, and unpredictabilities throughout their journeys across both internal and external realms. The research examines how women immigrants from India adapt to these ambivalences and remain resilient.
The report traces an individual journey through stages including planning, moving, arriving, settling, integrating, and thriving and examines the cycles of change and resilience while unpacking the invisible systemic factors that influence each stage. Additionally, the research contests the policy gaze, which adopts a simplistic and prototypical view of the immigration journey by uncovering five immigration patterns or pathways that frame individual journeys. These include linear, serial, circular, onward, and return migration. Individuals who move in these patterns possess unique mental models and behaviours and relate differently to their immigration experience.
This understanding of fragmented and nonlinear journeys presents novel individual and systemic intervention opportunities. The study concludes with sixteen thought-starters for innovation. The purpose is to engage multi-stakeholder dialogue and co-creation to design an ecosystem of support that promotes immigrant communities’ capacities for resilience
Play with Purpose: Exploring digital games to encourage gender equity in STEM
Get PDFPlaying digital games is one of the most popular activities amongst youth today. Research studies have connected young women who participate in digital games as three times more likely to pursue a career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Although STEM skills are considered essential for the future of an innovative society, there exists a gap of the women represented in these fields. Exploring digital games provides a potential solution to closing this gap, however the digital games environment is not as inclusive for women as it could be.
As a result, this research focuses on utilizing digital games to support STEM education for young women in Canada. The research begins with a literature review, anonymous survey, semi-structured interviews, and a co-creative workshop to understand the experiences of women in digital games and STEM in Canada today, and to structure these insights through a Deconstruction:Reconstruction process. Systems mapping and foresight tools were also used to generate a desired future and guide strategic recommendations.
Insights suggest a desire for education on digital etiquette and the development of a digital space where young women can practice building confidence while having their voices heard. Three opportunity spaces were identified as key leverage points to intervene within the digital game system, including opportunities between Educational, Recreational and Gaming Industry subsystems. These opportunity spaces were further established as two recommendations that provide strategic initiatives for educational institutions to engage with digital games, involving different stakeholders in the system. By changing the experiences women currently have while engaging in digital games, perhaps more women would be inclined to participate in play and therefore engage in STEM fields
Digitized Diasporic Memory: Leveraging User-Generated and Open Tools for Collective Audio Storytelling
Get PDF“Digitized Diasporic Memory” explores the relationship, intersections, connections, and divergencies of experiences between Black diasporic people. With an understanding of diaspora as networked, rhizomatic, and tentacled, the project seeks to create a space for connection, in an environment where connection is not easily accessed or sustained across these communities of people. The thesis draws heavily from the idea of personal networked thinking and expands into collective thinking, or what Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes as mind-to-mind networks, wherein several individuals connect their ideas.
The following document details the conception of open-source and open-access technologies which illustrate how our individual pasts weave in and out of each other. The first is a proof of concept for a relational database of crowd-sourced audio memories, and the second is a web application that maps and visualizes the connections between the submitted stories. The document also details the thesis study in which the technologies are put to the test by people of African descent residing on Turtle Island. “Digitized Diasporic Memory” is part database, part conversational archive, part open-access library, part collective memory bank, part digitized memory, and part chain of memories which bring to the fore the possible connections between Black diasporic experiences and narratives. It addresses the need for intra-diasporic validation, belonging, understanding across differences, and knowledge-sharing
Pathwaves Digital Music: Horizon Scan
Get PDFA Horizon Scan of Drivers and Trends within the Canadian Digital Music sphere for consideration in meaningful innovation for musicians and disruption that may favour creatives. Created as part of the Pathwaves Digital Music Incubator by the Super Ordinary Laboratory at OCAD University
Framing a process model for design impact with a systemic lens
No full textThe current societal challenges require different stakeholders to act on different systemic levels. Design is seen as a valuable approach to addressing these challenges. Christine De Lille and Anja Overdiek (RSD10, 2021) developed a model to explain how to move from the current system toward a preferred future system. In this process, through the use of labs, one is moving from a systemic level to a concrete level to create an impact on the systemic level.
In the first phase, we work on understanding the current system through mapping the system and identifying the stakeholders and engaging the different stakeholders. With the different stakeholders, we create visions for the future. In the second phase, we engage in local labs. In these local labs, participants test, explore ideas, experiment, test prototypes, and learn what would work and not work in the new system. In the third phase, we reflect and evaluate the insights from the local labs and, building on these insights, create new systems.
The process model, “impacting systems with labs” (below), helps to understand how to move from understanding the current system to a preferred future system. Based on the learnings from different case studies, we increased our understanding of this process and what to do to maximise our impact. We seek to expand our knowledge on the indicators for the effectiveness at the different stages and activities in the process to create maximum impact and systemic change.
We begin by sharing earlier case studies and workshops with two agencies guiding these processes. These have provided us with some insights into the indicators for success. We seek the experiences and knowledge of the participants about the indicators they know for the different stages in the process.
Which systemic concepts and tools do you associate with the different lab phases? How do these concepts/ tools deepen or alternate the curve?
The workshop includes an in-depth discussion on the indicators for success and the impact these may have. Our goal is to draw some conclusions from there and discuss how one might integrate these insights into further learning about the needed methods, tools and skills for processes of systemic change
Play Probes For Systemic Design Decisions
Get PDFThe European Systemic Design Lab (ESDL) is an ongoing cooperation between three European universities. To deal with the complexity that entails the creation of an international platform for Systemic Design such as ESDL, the team will offer an in-person workshop and make use of Play Probes to create a safe space and adopt questioning, risk-taking and exploring behaviours with participants. During this format, they will enter a hands-on, playful dialogue concentrating on the present and, most importantly, on the possible futures of Systemic Design and the potential establishment of an educational programme within it. This type of dialogue is made possible by using a probe kit developed at HTW Berlin, whose goal is to work on three stations (“Expectations, Dynamics and Code of Conduct”) while writing keywords on “building blocks” and connecting them together in a mindful way, thus creating abstract and organic sculptures. During the building process, participants are motivated to exchange and communicate, not only with others but also with themselves, by reflecting on their thoughts, expectations and wishes. In the end, the team should be able to observe a tangible representation of each participant’s wishes in regard to the creation of ESDL that can be discussed and documented
Sensing Our Way Through Design over Time
Get PDFWe are living in unprecedented times, two and a half years into living with covid-19 and the layering of the health, cost of living and ecological crises facing us. Have we had time to stop? How are we learning from these urgent challenges? How are we caring for ourselves and each other?
In this in-person workshop, we will explore individual, relational and collective experiences of sense-making practices around the theme of ‘design over time’. Sense-making allows us to locate ourselves within the dynamics, contexts and paradigms we are part of and influenced by. It helps us to reveal where we are and align people toward more just and beautiful futures.
The workshop will incorporate movement, meditation, somatic, and art-based practices, working with the physicality of the environment and the in-person group dynamics. Drawing from Process-Oriented Psychology and Organisational, Relationship, Systems Coaching, participants will move through group systems constellation, and individual reflective practice to explore their relationship to a provocation explored through time. Finally, we will hold a space to integrate learning and insights through creative and embodied practices.
At the heart of our practice together will be a spirit of care and support. We know that it’s hard to corral engagement, navigate power and work through uncertainty. We know that change-work can be isolating, affronting, and bring up inner conflicts. We are offering a space to help you deepen your enquiry in a collective. We’ve picked tools that we find nourishing and offer them up as practices that we hope you’ll return to