Workshops

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Workshop 1:  Dobble Debate

Lynne Heller lheller@ocadu.ca

Nina Czegledy nczegledy@ocadu.ca

Time: 16th May 2022 (Monday) 10:00 am to 12:00 am EST

Format: This workshop will follow a hybrid format. The zoom link will be shared on the conference Discord for the online participant (registration is required)

Dobble Debate is a set of resources that uses play and humour to help people learn and talk about disabilities(*). The project supports designers, educators and gamers in facilitating creative and respectful discussions by providing assets to develop games that address disability. The resources consist of a Ready-to-Go game, gameplay examples, decks of cards and avatars, which are all designed to encourage diverse perspectives. These assets were developed by co-creating with people from various communities that identify as disabled.

Workshop participants will initially be guided through the Dobble Debate game website. The session will then offer an opportunity to design gameplay using the provided cards and guiding questions, followed by group reflection and feedback. The participants will come away from this workshop with a thorough understanding of Dobble Debate’s potential and affordances for educational play.

(*) Dobble Debate recognizes that every individual’s life experience is different, and changes significantly based on their current environment. Therefore, we would like to refine our use of the term disability by explicitly acknowledging the D/deaf and hard of hearing, disability, differing abilities, autism, and neurodiversity plus (DDDAND+) communities. This acronym does not cover all the diverse identities usually lumped under ‘disability’; we are using it to draw attention to the variety of human experience and everyday innovation.

Workshop 2: EDI in research practice: application to grant applications and promotion portfolios

Prof. Deborah Fels dfels@ryerson.ca – Director – IMDC, Ryerson University

Dr. Shital Desai desais@yorku.ca – Director – SaTS lab, York University

Gabriella Hong – Design Researcher (Design Thinking, UX, and Strategy), IMDC, Ryerson University

Time: 16th May 2022 (Monday) 1 pm to 3:30 pm EST

Format: This workshop will follow a hybrid format. The zoom link will be shared on the conference Discord for the online participant (registration is required)

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion is not only a new mandate of all tri-council granting agencies but also beginning to have a strong presence in university policies and practices including research ethics, hiring and promotion activities. Translating those mandates into individual research programs and outcomes can be difficult particularly when researchers have limited experience with the wide range of methods, individual perspectives, and systemic issues involved in EDI. Using standard Human Resources or Research Office EDI statements is also insufficient to demonstrate to granting agencies and reviewers a true understanding and appreciation of EDI. This workshop will introduce the concepts of EDI as applied to the research context. This will include presentations and discussion by researchers who embed EDI principles within their research, assessing one’s own biases, developing use cases that apply to participant’s research, and then how to translate those use cases into tri-council verbiage for research grant applications.  

Workshop attendees will be expected to –

  1. Participate in Q&A
  2. Carry out self-assessment of biases (individual)
  3. Create use cases for own research (individual)
  4. Construct EDI paragraph/points aimed at tri-council requirements (in breakout session)

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Gain knowledge of concepts of, and differences between equity, diversity, inclusion, equality and related issues. This will include insights into who is affected by EDI.
  2. Discover own biases
  3. Gain insights into how to present and represent EDI in own research
  4. Going beyond standard HR and research office statements e.g., budget and time implications, customizing to an individual’s research context, etc.

Bios

Deborah Fels, PhD., P.Eng.

Dr. Fels has a PhD (1994) in Human Factors from Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is currently employed as a professor in the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, and the Director of the Inclusive Media and Design Centre at Ryerson University. Her research interests involve inclusive design, access to media and technology for people with disabilities and older adults, and inclusive business. She has published over 150 articles on inclusive technologies and applications and received three patents.

Shital Desai, PhD.

Dr. Desai is an Assistant Professor in Interaction Design at the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design and director of CFI funded Social and Technological Systems (SaTS) lab at York University. Her research addresses issues that focus on UN Sustainable Development Goals using Design Research methods, Human Centred Design, Systems Design and Speculative Design approaches. To that extent, she cocreates accessible technologies, services and governance policies for marginalised demographics and global health. Shital is a member of the WHO Dementia Knowledge Exchange peer review network where she shares her expert knowledge on dementia and technology in strengthening policies, service planning and health and social care systems for dementia. She is passionate about training students in Systems Design and Design thinking methods to address societal issues around accessibility and inclusivity. Shital is the recipient of several awards and grants, including 2021-22 AMPD Research award, Petro Canada Young Innovator Award and tri-council grants – SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC. She received NSERC Discovery grant in 2021 to design and develop adaptive assistive technologies for people with dementia.

Workshop 3: Creating Spontaneous and Mobile Immersive spaces using FLOSS

Christian Frisson cfrisson@sat.qc.ca, Society for Arts and Technology [SAT]

Michał Seta mseta@sat.qc.ca, Society for Arts and Technology [SAT]

Emmanuel Durand edurand@sat.qc.ca, Society for Arts and Technology [SAT]

Time: 16th May 2022 (Monday) 4 pm to 6 pm EST

Topic

This workshop is aimed at artists, designers, content creators and other creatives who are interested in creating immersive spaces using low-cost and lightweight equipment. We will be using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software to create interactive and immersive experiences, from scratch, in impromptu spaces. We will present the tools and the process for deploying immersive experiences: characterizing the available space, setting up projection mapping, calibrating

video projectors and sound equipment, setting up cameras for real-time pose tracking and estimation, and employing a software pipeline to glue all components together. The workshop is based on using free/libre open-source software as much as possible, democratizing what’s possible to do with computer vision, computer graphics and spatialized audio technologies that are still marginalized and on the fringes of creative activities. We will be exploring production pipelines that illustrate the use of software developed by the Metalab in tandem with existing tools that have been seeing wider adoption in recent years. For clarity, we present the proposed toolset in two groups: software developed by the Metalab and third-party software.

  • Metalab software:
    • LivePose – for interpreting live pose estimation using machine learning
    • Splash – for video mapping
    • SATIE – for sound rendering and spatialization
  • Other possible software: 
    • Godot Game Engine – live 3D renderer for interactive content
    • Chataigne – show control and “glue” for data mapping
    • Ossia Score – show control and “glue” for data mapping

The above software can run on low-cost, low-energy hardware such as Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson single board computers. We believe that putting such hardware and open-source software into creative hands can bring awe an wonder as much, if not more, than the technological bloat that we experience today. The call for participation to this workshop will emphasize first and foremost the collaboration, sharing and accessibility aspects from where an art piece can emerge from. Collaboration and sharing aspects are brought firstly by the ‘creation of a single interactive and immersive experience, all participants being encouraged to come with ideas and content and to be open to the suggestions of other participants. Sharing and accessibility are brought by the use of technologies which are easy to obtain. In addition to cameras, videoprojectors and audio speakers, the workshop makes use of free software as well as low-cost hardware. Some of the software is already well known in the community (Godot, Chataigne), whereas our own software is not as much but it addresses use cases which are either not possible with other software or involve costly solutions.

Plan of the workshop

  • Introduction to the challenges of creating immersive artworks
  • Summary overview of different solutions (software/hardware) to address the challenges
  • Introduction to the Metalab software/hardware ecosystem
  • Implementation of a simple immersive (audio-visual and interactive) installation with attendees’ participation
  • Discussion 

Bios

Founded in 2002, Metalab is the research laboratory of the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT]. Metalab’s mission is twofold: to stimulate the emergence of innovative immersive experiences and to make their design accessible to artists and creators of immersion through an ecosystem of free software that addresses problems that are not easily solved by existing tools. The software (and recently hardware) developed at the Metalab is often used with other existing technologies to facilitate the mixing of video mapping, 3D audio, telepresence and interaction. Emmanuel Durand holds a doctorate in computer graphics from Arts et Métiers ParisTech (2013). He has an interest in everything related to 3D, photography and space. Michał Seta is a composer, improviser and researcher in digital arts. Practitioner of transdisciplinary, transcalar, and integrative magic, he incants Metalab software in collective and improvised harmony.

Christian Frisson was a doctoral researcher at the University of Mons (numediart Institute, ISIA Lab) and a postdoctoral researcher at Inria (Mjolnir team), at the University of Calgary (Interactions Lab), and at McGill University (IDMIL). He creates tools to author interactive multimedia materials; using computer vision, computer graphics, and haptic and sound feedback.