Decision Maker Series: Economic focus needs to shift from “new media” to “digital”: Sara Diamond

Forget “new media.” The future lies with “digital” pursuits, according to one Canadian visionary. Sara Diamond, president of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), has tossed the old moniker and says we should get on with the job of making this industry a veritable economic powerhouse. Forget “new media.” The future lies with “digital” pursuits, according to one Canadian visionary. Sara Diamond, president of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), has tossed the old moniker and says we should get on with the job of making this industry a veritable economic powerhouse. “We used to call it ‘new media.’ I’ve stopped using that term. I’ve gone back to referring to digital,” Diamond says in a phone interview from her Toronto office (click here for the full interview transcript). “It’s about materials, for sure. And it’s about environmental controls. There’s still a robust place for media-based knowledge and digital media industries, but I think when we talk about the digital, it’s across many different kinds of capabilities.” She should know. As OCAD’s president, Diamond is one of the leading lights in a pan-Canada initiative to make art and design fundamental across all sorts of industries – life-sciences, financial services, manufacturing, etc. And this isn’t all new for her. Prior to OCAD, Diamond was at the Banff Centre art and culture institution in Alberta, where she created the Banff New Media Institute and forged alliances between art, science, social science and business disciplines. She’s made a name for herself as an interdisciplinary practitioner, whose artistic installations, computer software, and work with artificial intelligence have brought together various faculties, crossing boundaries few have dared to bridge. The National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art in New York count Diamond creations among their collections. Unity is at the heart of her work – but it’s also the industry’s touchstone. And the sector faces a number of challenges in bringing it all together, she says. “I think the process of bringing minds to the table from the different disciplinary spaces and facilitating that dialogue – and making sure the research is able to go forward, or the kind of innovation or commercialization or public distribution is able to go forward – I think that is still at the start-up here,” she says, speaking specifically about Ontario. Alberta has witnessed some success with interdisciplinary convergence, she says. And when it comes to inter-institution convergence, so has Quebec, where Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) created the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies to share knowledge, faculty and artistic resources. In Ontario, efforts such as the Consortium on New Media, Creative, and Entertainment in the Toronto Region (CONCERT) involving OCAD, Ryerson University and York University have helped pave the way for research-industry engagement. But it’s a long haul, bringing art and design together with other industries at a fundamental level – and it’s just beginning, Diamond says. A solid step forward was the inception of MaRS Innovation, a commercialization partnership of 14 Toronto-area academic research institutions. Housed within the MaRS Centre for research and business confluence, Innovation received $15 million earlier this year for a five-year program to accelerate commercialization efforts among promising research lines. “OCAD is happily one of the three universities in that,” Diamond says. “We’ll be more in the labs hopefully with researchers from companies that are more at the fundamental level, looking at how what they’re doing can be translated into a service or a product. I feel like that piece of the innovation chain is very much in formation.” That’s the sort of thing Diamond would like to see happen more often – especially in Ontario’s wireless sector. Chair of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC), she recently helped present a new white paper outlining Ontario’s strengths and weaknesses: while the province’s wireless industry is strong, Canada as a whole lacks a robust wireless infrastructure. (For more details, see “Ontario needs to do more for wireless...”.) Diamond is optimistic about the nation’s prospects, “if we can get it together fairly quickly,” she says. “We do have some real strengths here, and we have seen this migration of power to application development and content and services, which in some ways require capitalization, require investment, but are also relatively light in investment compared to heavy technology.” One issue: the constant battle for resources among the digital hotspots. “That’s a real concern. We have to think, we could be a Singapore, we could be a Silicon Valley. But it requires Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa – we really do need to keep working together to have the level of positioning that larger centres or very concentrated centres have been able to create.” This could be one of the topics that pop up during Canada 3.0, next month’s conference in Stratford, ON, concerning a wide range of digital industry matters. Diamond is one of the presenters. “I am co-facilitating with colleagues at Open Text the entire mobile piece, which is eight sessions... I’ll walk through innovation and insight – our mobile industry analysis and the research we’ve done. I’ll do that with (MEIC project manager) Michele Perras. I’ll also be facilitating a number of different panels, and the larger conversation there.” Another piece of this larger conversation speaks to Diamond’s personal philosophy, which informs her interdisciplinary activity. “I’m very committed to keeping our sense of physicality in place when we speak about the digital... How do we build technologies and interfaces that really keep us grounded in the face-to-face, real-world challenges? And then how do we use the digital and virtual as ways of building both other kinds of experiences that factor into that world, and how it transforms in thoughtful ways, or a really strong reciprocity with the physical experience?” In this age of virtual worlds such as Second Life and elaborate online games, the interconnection between the physical and the digital is changing. “I do accept virtual spaces as real spaces, I suppose – and you can lose people to those spaces, or they can find another life in those spaces... On the other hand, I think it’s important for us to continue to maintain, sustain, enrich the face-to-face qualities of what human society has also built.” Stefan Dubowski is a freelance writer in Ottawa. You can reach him via sdubowski@rogers.com.

Decision Maker Series: Economic focus needs to shift from “new media” to “digital”: Sara Diamond

Broadcast | May 27, 2009

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