Projects
sLab research projects investigate innovation options and alternative futures across a range of interrelated domains. The research program is demand-driven, needs-based, and underwritten by research contracts, grants, participation by faculty, students and our community, and base institutional support.
sLab's methodogical approach reflects the values and priorities of our learning community:
  • Systemic Design — Problem finding, framing & solving that is human-centred, life-affirming & systems-savvy
  • Creative insight — For platforms, policies, systems and services that are accessible, intelligible & equitable
  • Horizon scanning — Tracking change in social, technological, economic, ecological, political & values spectra
  • Participatory Foresight — Collectively exploring, questioning, pluralizing & shaping the futures
  • Anticipatory planning — Understanding impacts is key to our guiding philosophy

Selected projects

Synthesis Maps 2020
New, large-scale maps relevant to problem areas of interest selected by student teams in Systemic Design, part of OCAD University's Strategic Foresight & Innovation MDes program (SFI)

FutureCitiesJam for Future Cities Summit
How might we engage and focus diverse experts and activists to envision and prepare for challenging urban futures?  This question was addressed head-on when a team representing OCAD University in Toronto, Canada planned and facilitated a Foresight Scenarios Workshop as part of the inaugural Future Cities Summit, organized and hosted at the Brickworks by Evergreen, a Canadian non-profit dedicated to making cities flourish.

Futures workshop for IISD Green Conflict Minerals

How might the mining industry play a key role in the transition toward a low-carbon future? sLab worked with IISD to investigate pathways to possible futures.

Synthesis Maps | Gigamaps
Synthesis maps & gigamaps from sLab research projects and publications from SFI Systemic Design courses are presented, with examples & references.

What is Foresight? Video Series
Co-created with Policy Horizons Canada to introduce their work anticipating challenges & opportunities in federal government. Produced in English & French versions, and fully captioned for inclusive accessibility.

DesignJam
Design thinking & creative business skills for young startups & social innovators.

Digital Governance
Transforming government practice in the digital era. Through research & engagement, Digital Governance develops a network equipped to understand these dynamics & to guide innovation. The project operates as a foresight commission with grant support from SSHRC.

sLab Events
sLab organizes public events to foster understanding and dialogue about design, innovation, foresight, strategy, and social change. Presenters and workshop facilitators range from international authors and leading practitioners to emerging voices.

Strategic Foresight for OCAD University, 2012-2017
sLab contributed foresight scenarios development and strategic perspectives to the OCAD strategic plan, Advancing Excellence at OCAD University in the Age of Imagination, 2012-2017.

SafeFont
The SafeFont Project focuses on diversity — of technology use, displays, information needs, and human capabilities. The aim is to design and test a set of new approaches to typeface and display technology — the advent of a ‘safe font’ that is flexible enough to be used across healthcare settings and legible enough to be used by anyone. For more information please contact Kate Sellen.

Economic Futures for Ontario 2032
An Ontarian-centred foresight project investigating divergent, future economic prospects through our needs & wants, behaviours, cultures & expectations, now through 2032.

Visualizing Emergence
Understanding innovation through data visualization of emergence (bottom-up self organization) in complex systems

2020 Media Futures
An ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

SSHRC Imagining Canada's Future: DD Co-Lab
Expert panel on future challenges for Southern Ontario in the context of global urbanization. sLab led this research partnership with UOIT, Ryerson, Windsor & York U to ask: “In the face of intensified urbanization worldwide, what do we see as the highest impact social & human challenges for Southern Ontario, now through 2030?”

sBook: Futures of the Book
The sBook project proposes a unifying framework for readers, writers and publishers that ties together emerging features and standards and supports new forms of functionality and interoperability that achieve our design vision.