SOCIABILITY

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DEBORAH SHACKLETON: We're here with Kate Armstrong who is the
director of the SIM Centre at Emily Carr. I'll start off by asking you
Kate, what is the SIM Centre?

KATE ARMSTRONG: SIM stands for Social & Interactive Media. The
centre is devoted to looking at and facilitating applied research projects
in the area of social and interactive media. Essentially | am interested

in the internet, and in looking at the different ways that the internet
restructures aspects of contemporary culture and life. It’s a broad
umbrella but the focus is on forging partnerships between industry
partners and Emily Carr faculty and students.

So then how does the centre operate in terms of university culture
and industry culture? In my own experience, sometimes they are not
speaking the same language so how do you navigate that space?

| think that one of the opportunities for the centre, in terms of function,
is to facilitate those conversations and the differences that are evident
there, and to find a way to match the interests of faculty and the needs
of companies. Sometimes companies have something they want to
think through or examine in a way that isn’t possible in the framework
of their everyday operations. So it’s an opportunity to take those situa-
tions and match the companies with the really creative people at Emily
Carr. People here have amazing ideas and can sometimes help compa-
nies innovate by applying those ideas in the context of business culture.

How is the reception of art and design in business culture?

| think that increasingly, people recognize that design is fundamental to
the success of business. Design and art drive innovation, and innovation
is a necessity. So it’s part of the conversation for sure. Having said that,

| think that every situation is different. So there’s an ongoing challenge
to both create value and communicate that value and articulate what
those opportunities might be.

In terms of the centre, if someone where to come along and say, well,
what are its core strengths? How would you frame that?

| think in the past, there has been a focus on electronic publishing and
e-books, and that continues to be a really interesting area, but at the
same time | am also thinking about new directions. For me, the internet
is the predominant condition of contemporary culture, and it produces

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN
BUSINESS & DESIGN CULTURE

interview with KATE ARMSTRONG (Director of SIM Centre at Emily Carr)

new frameworks for understanding everything from human relation-
ships, to how we use space and share resources.

Can you talk a bit about a couple of examples of projects where you
have overcome some of the challenges and you've got this synergy
happening between the academic and the business cultures?

There’s a really fantastic and exciting project right now that we’re
working on with the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla is built the Firefox
browser. As an organization they’re devoted to advancing dialogue
about transparency and privacy on the internet, and on promoting the
open web. Amber Frid-Jimenez is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr in
the Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media and she is working with a team
of Emily Carr students and developers from Mozilla. Their project is to
redesign Collusion, which is a plug-in for Firefox. Collusion shows how
your data, when you're browsing the internet, is being tracked and sold
to advertisers. Their objective in this research project is to explore differ-
ent ways to communicate the meaning of the data so that people have
a greater understanding of how they're being tracked when they browse
the internet and what that means for their privacy.

So as one person who is being tracked, | would see visualizations of
this and see patterns and themes that occur so that data would seem
almost like | can touch it and feel it?

Absolutely. They’re in a stage now where they’ve produced three
approaches to this visualization. There’s a new blog post at simcentre.
ca, which describes the project in more detail. But they are working
through how to display this information for user groups who have
different objectives and different levels of familiarity with issues of
privacy on the web.

If | was a potential client how would we start that process? | have

a problem or | have an area that is small but it has bothered me for
a really long time and I’m a technology company. So what happens
when | come to Emily Carr to the SIM centre?

There’s a variety of different things that can happen. Maybe a company
already knows what kind of problem they want to solve and they need
to get outside their relentless cycle of production in order to solve it, so
they engage us as a way to expand their capacity for innovation. We can
put together a small, faculty-led team that can develop these ideas. Or