#cmottawa

Matt Pinder and the benefit of cycling cities

From childhood to fatherhood, cycling has been a lifelong source of joy and independence for Matt Pinder. It has also been a professional pursuit and a personal passion: today, Matt is a transportation engineer, community activist, and imagines the future of transportation on his blog, Beyond the Automobile.

From the CreativeMornings Ottawa stage at Bayview Yards, Matt drove home a key message: “When you build a city for cycling, everyone benefits.”

Matt started by taking us on an armchair journey to the world’s most famous cycling city, Amsterdam. Travelling there for a course called Planning the Cycling City, Matt was exhilarated to see people of all ages riding bikes, solo and in groups, in rain or shine. The abundance of well-connected bike paths were often faster than driving, brought about more serendipitous encounters, and reduced noise and traffic congestion. In other words, everyone was benefiting. 

The course fuelled Matt’s professional raison d'être: to translate this idea of the cycling city from the Netherlands to Canada. He’s since gotten creative with engineering and drawn inspiration from other communities to innovate beyond existing city transportation policies—many of which favour cars.

Ottawa, Matt contends, is well positioned to become more of a cycling city. It can be easy to overlook our extensive network of National Capital Commission multi-use pathways. Or the fact that Ottawa is home to many firsts in Ontario, including the first Dutch-style protected intersection and first protected bike lane (along Laurier Avenue West). 

The way we move around our city can change—and we all have a role and creative vision in making that happen. Matt ended his talk by urging us to support walkable developments, dare to reimagine our communities, and yes, to advocate for cycling improvements as a way to build a city that benefits everyone. 

Gaby el Ashkar and the link between corruption and creativity

For as long as Gaby el Ashkar has known corruption, he has known creativity.

Gaby grew up in Beirut, Lebanon in the throes of a civil war. While some see creativity as a calling, Gaby turned to it first as a coping mechanism. Art became a way for him to make sense of the world. Today, he is a multidisciplinary visual artist, interior architect, and award-winning designer.

Over the years, Gaby observed how the corruption in Lebanon was made possible by a devious creativity. Corrupt individuals relied on design principles such as scale, manipulation, placement of images, and repetition to distract and deceive. And it was working—like an inkblot creeping across the page, the tendrils of corruption extended from individuals to compromise society and systems. 

As Gaby shared during his talk, this system-level corruption culminated in two significant events: a financial heist in which Lebanese citizens found their funds diverted and squandered by a state bank scheme. Overnight, people lost almost their entire life savings and were denied the ability to withdraw what was left. The second event was the deadly explosion at the Beirut port in 2020, the result of ammonium nitrate stored in a residential neighbourhood.

Gaby had experienced enough. Convinced that feeling exiled at home is worse than an exile that takes one away, he made the decision to move to Canada.

Through his art and his words, Gaby continues to speak out against corruption. From the stage at Bayview Yards, he implored us to use our creative outlets to shed light on the darkness of corruption. To counter indifference and unaccountability in pixels and clay, through lyrics and brushstrokes. 

We’ll leave the last words with Gaby: “Don’t look the other way. Be the just creativity that counters the devious one in order to preserve the colours of the things you find beautiful and worth fighting for.”

Alisha Giroux on the Creative Fingerprint

Creative artificial intelligence is less a futuristic concept than a technology that’s already part of our daily lives. 

So what does that mean for artists and creatives? 

Alisha Giroux’s talk was as much a reassurance as it was a call to action for people to recognize the signature characteristics that make their work unique. To embrace the innate human-ness of the creative process.

The emergence of creative AI used to keep Alisha up at night. As an illustrator and designer, she observed as AI generated images quickly went from funny and freaky to something that resembled art made by a real person. It felt distressing, like a threat to the personal touch she infused into her work. An affront to her creative core. 

One day, a friend helped shift her perspective. He was ambivalent about creative AI. The reason, he told Alisha: “A machine creating art feels like it’s defeating the purpose of creation.”

This was the message Alisha brought to the audience at Bayview Yards. That art is not exclusively about output, but also about the process that went into making it and the creator’s personal connection to their work. 

Besides, Alisha noted, humans like gathering IRL to see stuff made by other humans. Despite being able to google pictures of the Mona Lisa, people still fly to Paris to see her in the Louvre. And no matter how popular Spotify gets, it can’t replace the scratchy sound of a vinyl record. People crave the analogue, and art that bears a distinctly human fingerprint. 

Alisha ended by urging people to think about the personal touch they bring to their creative work—the style that can come only from the journey of creation and the human experience. Watch her full talk here!

Jacqui Du Toit on Finding the Sanctuary Within

From the stage of The Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa, Jacqui Du Toit asked us to conjure and connect to new worlds—ones she created through her storytelling and those that are inside of ourselves. 

Jacqui is a professional actress, storyteller, and dancer. She’s also a co-founder of The Origin Arts & Community Centre in Mechanicsville, a space where creators from all backgrounds and places can come together and feel at home. To find a sense of sanctuary. 

The search for sanctuary has been a thread throughout Jacqui’s life. Growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, Jacqui faced racism and bullying in school because of the colour of her skin and her accent. 

After one particularly difficult day, her father shared the story of Jabu, a young boy who lived by the motto “it is good.” Eventually, that story struck a chord. Jacqui realized that while she couldn’t control how people acted towards her, she could choose how she reacted. She took that lesson on a walk, wandering her school campus and talking to the trees. Soon, Jacqui started to create a safe haven of sanctuary within herself and with the earth around her. 

When she immigrated from South Africa to Ottawa 12 years ago, her personal resilience and sense of self and belonging were again challenged. Experiencing rejection after rejection from theatre companies, Jacqui recalled the story of Jabu and his positive mindset. 

She channelled those rejections into redirection, tapping into her own source of sanctuary and internal strength. She created an award-winning one-woman show and, through The Origin Arts & Community Centre, co-created a space for other Ottawa artists and creatives to express themselves freely and joyfully.

As Jacqui put it: “In the flow of creation is when you find your sanctuary.” You don’t want to miss Jacqui’s full talk! Watch it here.

What do you see when you fantasize about the future of SaaS?

The tech industry is one of the fastest changing industries in existence, with new advancements being made all the time. SaaS is no exception. In fact, in the last few years alone this sector has seen dramatic growth.

The SaaS market is set to continue its rise as service users become increasingly dependent and more knowledgeable about the products they’re using. Industry leaders such as Slack, InVison, Shopify, etc. are not only serving up functional products but also beautifully designed, and aesthetically pleasing products. So how important will design be in the fantastical future of SaaS?

Today many B2B software designers aren’t all that concerned with the appearance of a platform. Instead, they’re focused on how the platform functions in the context of the day-to-day life of their users. Function—not form—is the main aspect of product design that SaaS companies have focused on in order to add value for their customers. But the mediation between user and product is a prime place to add value – with intuitive design cutting down training costs, increasing efficiency, loyalty and making for an overall more enjoyable user experience – and companies like the ones above are masters of doing just that.

So what does the melding of form and function look like for a SaaS product, and how can it better connect users to the product’s unique features? Let’s chat about it next Wednesday, November 30 at our November CreativeMornings with Steve MacKenzie in partnership with SAAS North – Canada’s largest SaaS conference – at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa!

Get your free tickets here!