Ontario government buys OCAD a digital future for $2 million a year

The Ontario College of Art and Design marked the beginning of May with a new multi-million dollar initiative aimed at bringing art and design into the 21st century.Dubbed the Digital Futures Initiative, the program will see the Ontario government provide $2 million annually for the school to explore how best to integrate digital technology into traditional creative disciplines, including design, sculpture, painting, illustration, and more."We're not suggesting that students who want to learn how to draw and paint should have to become digital artists, by any means," says OCAD president Sara Diamond.But the school is mindful of the fact that as the world is transformed by technology and commercialization, so too are the traditional creative arts. The initiative also draws in private-sector partners to help provide work-study placements and internships, and even the odd guest instructor with expertise in a particular technology.As a result, OCAD will also have access to some of the cutting-edge research being conducted by its corporate partners, Diamond says. "We're doing some really great work in mobile experience design, and with Xerox we're launching a pretty major initiative looking at wearable technologies and new materials that can be used in all kinds of interesting ways," she says.The school is also teaching graduates to be more entrepreneurial in their approach to their art, and to recognize the business opportunities presented by creating works for the digital world." some of the communication I've had with people who work in the new media industries...they've seen a gap in the post-secondary environment," Diamond says. "There isn't an institution that is teaching people who are really creative excellent holistic managers...and also frankly become managers and start companies. We really see our job as a university environment as being able to provide that."Specifically, the money will be used to upgrade the technology used in-house at OCAD - Diamond refers to the current approach as "primarily a laptop program" - as well as hiring new instructors with specific competency in digital arts.Earlier this year, OCAD hinted at an overall shift in thinking at the school through initiatives such as the 20-plus stakeholder Consortium on New Media, Creative and Entertainment R&D in the Toronto Region (CONCERT) - a partnership between private industry and OCAD, York University and Ryerson University which received funding from the province's Entertainment and Creative Partnerships Cluster Fund in February - and Portage, a multi-site mobile technology showcase held at OCAD's Mobile Nation conference in March.While she admits that tech-forward types were talking about wearable technologies and digital painting before the dot-com bubble popped in the early 2000s, today's efforts are framed by a different environment: digital media are ubiquitous and well-ingrained in everyday life, and the tools are much more refined."We have sewing machines that can download a .gif and basically a circuit board out of metallic thread - how do you take that possibility into designing something that is a responsive garment?" she asks. "The technologies are much more stable in many ways than they were 10 years ago, the level of focused imagination is much more now coming from the art and design world, not only the engineering lab, and that's a huge shift."If you were in this space 10 years ago you'd be doing this on a research level," Diamond continues. "We're now looking at relationship between what happens in the research lab and what happens in the classroom and what can go out to commercialization - a much faster cycle now, and part of what we need to do is really prepare students to play in that world."However, the move toward a more technology-intensive and workplace-friendly focus hasn't met with universal approval. In a Globe and Mail piece covering the launch of the initiative, one alumnus of the school was quoted as referring to the move as "heart-breaking," and that the school shouldn't be concerned with commercial accessibility and training students for jobs in the corporate world.Diamond says such criticisms overlook OCAD's early-adopter status at earlier junctures where art and technology have met - for example, the school's then-cutting-edge robotic arts program set up in the 1980s by notable names such as Norman White, Doug Back and Simone Jones.And, Diamond adds, there will always be a place for the old ways of creating objects of beauty and meaning - what she calls "hand technologies." One such technology is the movable type printing press in OCAD's print studio, where students still set type by hand."We want to keep that in place, sometimes because it's interesting to have an anachronistic technology to return to and understand, but also to make very beautiful work with it in ways that digital can't always reproduce," she says.

Ontario government buys OCAD a digital future for $2 million a year

News | 05/14/2007 3:16 pm EDT

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