Happening at the Felt Lab

Hello everyone, 

We have decided to focus our efforts on other channels and as such are happy to announce that we are now on Instagram! Check out our account at reapwaterloo. You can also find us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.

To many, the words "virtual reality" are just buzz words. A concept. Yet for content creators with an eye to the future, it is the new world of possibilities and unique challenges that they need to learn how to overcome. And soon.

With HTC's Vive set to release in time for this holiday season at the end of 2015, and the Oculus Rift scheduled to be released commercially in early 2016, virtual reality is poised to take over the entertainment industry in a major way. In fact, some studios are already hard at work creating VR movies, and games. There are already a host of games and accessories already available on market.

In order to take advantage of this emerging market, content creators will need to learn a whole new set of skills to create content that is both compelling  and immersive, as well as understand the technical specifications and language associated with virtual content creation.

At REAP, we were fortunate to have two such experts in virtual reality join a packed house for our most recent lunch and learn. Jennifer Janik and Bernie Roehl of Deep Realities spoke of their own most recent experience from both the project management and technical development side when they were hired by the Lindt Chocolate Company to create a one of a kind immersive experience that would take place in various cities across the United States.

Click here to read the full blog post.

We had the pleasure of hosting Salman Heman from Axiom, an online platform that helps researchers, professionals and professors track, annotate, and centralize their digital documents easily and in one place.

You can read about the event on our blog, and check out our event photos below!

Last Friday, we were joined by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan, Executive Director of WeirdCanada.com and Wyrd Arts Initiatives, which is a non-profit dedicated to encouraging, documenting, and connecting creative expression across Canada. She generously shared with us how she helped to revolutionized the arts and music website.

When Marie landed at Weird Canada, it was a tiny music blog with a few writers, a few posts a week, and a vision to celebrate underrepresented Canadian music. It was one blog in the sea of a million blogs.

But like so many bright ideas before, one year into its birth, Weird Canada hit a wall: energy turned into excuses, missed deadlines, and faltering morale. They weren't dying from lack of need. In fact, the DIY and emerging music community in Canada was thriving. MySpace had launched millions of tiny bedroom and garage bands out into the world, but no one was really listening.

And so there it was: a tiny blog made up of music nerds, struggling to find the energy and time at the end of a long day to write a blog post. Musicians loved it but it seemed like no one else cared. Then something funny happened.

Someone nominated Weird Canada as CBC R3’s “best music website in Canada.” They were on the end of a very long list, and stood virtually no chance against the other blogs also on the list, which included Exclaim, Joel Plaskett's blog, Matthew Goode's blog, Disorder magazine, and other Goliaths. It was a seemingly impossible challenge. So they decided to give it their all.

They reached out to every friend Weird Canada had. They said: “We want to win this thing. We don't have a chance. Will you help us?” And though all these DIY artists and communities were tiny, when banding together they turned into an unstoppable army. All these tiny communities heard the calling and they shouted back: YES.

And then something amazing happened: They won.

In that moment they realized they were at a pivotal moment: Step-up and make something happen, or step back and let the communities fracture and fragment back into geographical division.

So they started listening. They opened their doors and asked people what they wanted and what they needed, and drew an enormous map of everything that their community wanted them to be. This Marie turned into a mandate, a dream, and a list of 35 objectives.

Immediately after finalizing the objectives they got started realizing them. Marie incorporated Weird Canada as a national not-for-profit in the Fall, and have (with the support of a volunteer army) been steadily working on achieving their list of dreams.

Through their mandate, they’ve accomplished many of their goals, and below is a list of five key learnings that Marie offered on how to make your community more accessible:

Define your community and communicate your intent to be accessible Not everyone belongs in every space. This isn’t a conversation about how everyone should be everywhere all the time. What is needed is an ongoing and thoughtful conversation about inclusivity, and an awareness of community boundaries and barriers.

Identify Barriers Develop a barrier-based mentality, where you identify barriers and treat them with respect, no matter how small they look. List some things that might prevent people from getting into spaces. And if you are having a hard time with brainstorming, just look around to see who is missing.

Look for Gaps  Who is in your space? Who is not? Make a list, and then systematically go through it.  You can be certain that if there are certain demographics missing from your community, it is because there are barriers in place. You need to go to the missing people, don’t wait for them to come to you. Don’t be weird about it, just ask what they think about your space. Note: It can feel a bit scary to ask our communities the important question: “who is missing, here?” People will get defensive and angry, no matter how you ask them. The anger is a good thing. It means you are poking in the right direction.

Communicate your intent to be accessible Tell people what you are doing. This will open you up to all kinds of criticism. Other people will notice your mistakes. This is a good thing.

You may not have heard of it; the small innovation lab started by Manulife Financial and housed at Kitchener’s own Communitech building. The lab was founded a year ago by Rocky Jain, who joined us on Friday to share his experiences having launched the RED lab, and what he’s learned about innovation while doing so. 

Initially approached by Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, on behalf of the CIO and CEO of Manulife Financial, he was told that they were looking to seed a start-up innovation lab, which was to be housed in the Communitech building.

The goal? To rage against the machine from within the organization itself, yet housed externally, where it would be free from the corporate culture of the main business. 

Intrigued, Rocky requested only one stipulation: that there would be no strings attached; the lab would exist to innovate, not monetize. This was agreed to immediately, and with that, Rocky went out and bought an entirely new business appropriate wardrobe so that during his first week he could spend time at Manulife to research what sort of problems the company wanted to solve. 

Ironically, the CEO discouraged him from changing his attire, specifically because she didn’t want him to be influenced by the corporate culture. Her advice was to “stay true to who you are, and not conform to the established system.

Inspired by this, Rocky chose to name the lab the RED lab, which stands for Research, Exploration, and Development, but more importantly, because symbolically, the colour red sits opposite green on the colour wheel, and represents how the lab has an entirely different way of thinking from Manulife. 

He then went on to hire a small team of dedicated professionals and co-op students who work to disrupt the processes at Manulife Financial. He insisted upon hiring people from outside of the organization, and who were what he called generalists.

“I wanted people who had three years of experience in 10 different things, and not those who had 10 years of experience in three things,” he said. The greatest challenge he shared was in finding people who weren't looking for stability, and who were okay with the idea of not being able to define success.

Initially he hired co-op students in traditionally technology and software focused roles, but in this next year intends to expand hiring to include UX/UI students and business students from across Canada. 

One of the key things he says he’s learned is that innovation cannot come from incentives through pay or work processes, as this inherently focuses people’s attention on wanting to please their bosses. He found that time is one of the best incentive tools for those who enjoy to create, simply for the love of doing so, as time is the one resource that creators most value: the time to make their ideas come to life.

One of the questions posed is what happens when you come across an idea that would disrupt or destroy parts of, or the entire industry. Rocky acknowledged that this is always a concern in innovation, but that’s it's better to be in front of these changes, rather than simply reacting to external threats. 

On Friday January 16th we were joined by a panel of marketers who bring with them years of Communications and Digital Media experience.

Joining us were Kim Denstedt, who teaches Public Relations, Corporate Communications, Media Relations, and Advertising to post-grad students in the Integrated Marketing Communications Program at Conestoga College. Nicole Renfer, who is a graduate of both Conestoga College and Wilfrid Laurier, and currently works as the Marketing Coordinator at Honeypot Marketing in Waterloo. Sarah Rodrigues, who graduated from both the University of Waterloo and Conestoga College and is currently pursuing an MBA part-time while working as the Advertising Coordinator for Skyline Living. And Riani DeWet, who is currently working towards a post-graduate certificate in Integrated Marketing Communications, and has extensive work experience in government, including Marketing, PR, Communications, and Event Management.

The topic focused on Integrated Marketing plans, the central point being that marketing plans need to be integrated, so that all parts of the organization are working together to avoid waste in resources and time implementing the same or similar ideas across departments. It is better to integrate early, especially for small companies as it’s harder to go back and fix things later.

Another key point of discussion was the need to know your audience, and to create a chain of touch points during their journey that has consistent, but tailored messaging. The goal is to communicate the same message, but in different ways, depending on the needs and desires of your audience.

When it comes to Crisis Communications, it was stressed that having a cohesive team is much more effective than group of teams, or silos of departments, as from their experience cohesive teams pull their organizations through P.R. disasters more effectively.

Finally, the importance of setting measurable objectives right from the beginning and knowing what you are trying to achieve, whether it be an increase in sales, the change of sentiment, or an increase in awareness, these need to be set and the mechanics of their measurement need to be defined before beginning to enact the plan.

As for the future of Marketing and Communications, all the panelists agreed that big data and the knowledge of how to utilize and interpret this data would be a major skill for the future, as well as understanding technology such as social media – which has already had a massive effect on Marketing and P.R.

We were happy to welcome Sam Qorbani, MDEI candidate at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford Campus, and a professional in 3D design to the lab for our most recent lunch and learn. The focus of the talk was in his experience using the edddison extension in SketchUp as a professional 3D artist.

Edddison is a plugin that works with many of the most popular 3D software engines, including Unity, AutoDesk Showcase, NavisWorks, and WebGL, and contains a simplified editor that allows users to design interactive applications without programming knowledge.  

It also allows for easy navigation through SketchUp models through their touch screen app.  Sam demonstrated how this works, but did note that there were some network issues getting his phone app to connect with his laptop on the wireless, and ended up having to pair his phone to his laptop to overcome this issue. On the upside, he also shared that the company is working out their connectivity bugs, and that they offer good support for their users.  

Once working, the app did allow the user to “walk” through the 3D model. However, as a professional developer, Sam noted that most professionals already have 3D mouse options that allow them to do this already. However, for professionals in other industries, such as real estate developers, sales representatives, builders and architects, this is an excellent alternative option.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and while we are excited to look ahead to the great new plans we have for the coming year (including a new website, which will be unveiled soon!) it’s also good to look back on the past year, to celebrate our successes and the good times we had together.

To that end, we held our end of year potluck on December 19th. It was a smashing success, with a massive spread of delicious foods, enjoyed by all attendees.

We also had the pleasure of listening to the dulcet tones of musician Tim Louis, renowned jazz singer who has entertained Presidents, Prime Ministers, and royalty.

And to top it off we were joined by Zane from Photobooth2Go, who generously donated his time and portable green screen photobooth. Everyone had a blast having their pictures taken and their photograph inserted into a variety of funny backgrounds.

We were happy to have the gentlemen from Structur3D Printing join us for a recent lunch and learn. Attendees got to play first hand while the guys from Structur3D demo-ed their Discov3ry extruder, an add-on device to the Uni-Maker 3D printer. The Discov3ry allows enthusiasts to print a wide range of pastes and soft materials, such as calking, wood filler, Playdoh, and Nutella.

Structur3D is the product of Charles Mire and Andrew Finkle, both material scientists. Their invention has already garnered great interest from both local and global Maker groups from San Francisco, to New York, and even on Kickstarter, where they had over 500 backers and raised over $100,000.

They shared their plans for the next year, which includes:

•             Working with bio materials •             Pre-filled cartridges •             Empty cartridges •             Fostering a community (forum) •             3D printed food!

November was a fun and educational month for our REAPsters and Felt Lab supporters who joined us for our two 'Thinkering' events.

The first event was brought courteously by Boltmade, one of our industry partners who have generously offered to partner with us to do a series of training seminars.

The focus of this first seminar was on Rapid Prototyping, which is a set of techniques used to refine ideas in software development.

Our second event was brought to us by two MaRS Studio Y graduates. The details of that event can be found on our previous post or on our blog. They even wrote their own blog post about their visit, which you can read here. And they've generously posted their slidedeck from their presentation.

MaRs Studio Y Fellows and graduates, Scott Baker and Ross Curtner, visited REAP for a Thinkering event last Friday. 36 Designers, artists, and technologists came out to take on Scott and Ross’s challenge to propose out-of-the-box ideas in preparation for the 2015 United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in November.

The challenge to REAP? To use a specific technology, InteraXon’s Muse, a headband that senses brainwaves and then turns that information into a feedback and training tool, to create empathy-based art that will highlight the importance of climate change.