Artists & designers: an experiment in data visualization

OCAD University's strategic plan Living in the Age of Imagination places a priority on focusing the lenses of art, design and media on contemporary issues and practices outside of the traditional boundaries of art and design. This has resulted in a myriad of innovative curriculum and research initiatives of specific relevance to HCI. For example in concert with led partner York University, the University of Toronto and a set of industrial partners OCAD University has created the Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design (CIV/DDD), a research hub for the development of next-generation data visualization techniques and their underlying information processing and communication technologies (ICT). This centre is the focus of this talk. The idea was that by bringing an unprecedented number of interdisciplinary artists, designers, media makers, humanist analysts and social scientists into the research partnership we would develop new paradigms of data enquiry, user-centered visualization models, and information processing and display technologies.