Greg Sims, I'thandi Munro

Shifting Values investigates the creation of parametrically-designed objects based on data derived from a survey of students regarding their potentially racialized experiences at the post-secondary level. The jewellery ring format is familiar, intimate and has functional aspects that may or may not be impacted by the data set. Facilitated conversations in small groups will serve to answer the initial research questions, and also contribute to a broader discussion of racism and its impacts in post-secondary education. As craft practitioners, we have experienced first-hand the ways in which objects can be used to create meaning, and want to engage participants in discussion regarding not only the particularities of their experience, but their views, assumptions, appraisal of the ability of objects to convey personal narrative.

Heller, Lynne, and Dorie Millerson. 

Craft, Pedagogy, and the Digital Challenge: A Jewelry Perspective has been published in the edited volume Digital Meets Handmade. As digital design, digital model-making, and prototyping have elbowed their way into common practice, they have proven themselves to be both invaluable and disruptive to the jewelry profession. Bringing together the perspectives of artisans, educators, students, mavens from the realm of fine jewelry, renegades from the Wild West of the maker movement, and innovators from the digital engineering sector, Digital Meets Handmade addresses a wide range of topics in jewelry design, delving into the broad conversation around how digital technologies and virtuoso handcraft can coalesce in jewelry as wearable art.

Sensuality, AR/VR, and the Virtual Sublime has been published in the edited volume Virtual Reality and Its Application in Education. The article investigates the body, embodiment, augmented, virtual reality (AR/VR) and the virtual sublime. This article proposes that the heightened sensations of an AR/VR encounter lend themselves to the sublime. However, the deficit of AR/VR sensuality due to truncated sensorial input leads to feelings of disaffection and disconnection. The residual effect translates into a longing for a heightened engagement and becomes a yearning for the sensual input of physicality.

Our research initiative was awarded a Social Studies and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant for project Thinking through craft and the digital turn: studio practice, technology, and pedagogy within Canadian art and design universities. We have three years of funding to further our objective of connecting craft based departments in universities and colleges across Canada through surveys, innovative digital solutions such as augmented reality and research creation. We renamed the project Thinking Through Craft and The Digital Turn.

Lynne Heller and Dorie Millerson teamed up with fellow faculty member Greg Sims, along with Travis Freeman and Cary DiPietro of the Faculty and Curriculum Development Centre (FCDC) for the project, Craft and the Digital Challenge: student experiences of craft and digital technologies in the studio classroom at OCAD University. The group developed a project that included surveying students, analyzing their work and using critical discourse analysis to look at the data they collected.

After the interviews, the research team chose a quote from each interview that best represented its participants. Quotes were then incorporated into posters designed by Lynne Heller. The posters were hung in the entrance to OCAD U during Canadian Craft Biennale (CCB) conference proceedings.

Heller and Millerson gathered a group of research assistants to develop the project. The team included Claire Bartleman (Graduate Research Assistant), Ellie Manning (Undergraduate Research Assistant and Videographer) and Enna Kim (Undergraduate Research Assistant).

In addition to the video, Claire Bartleman and Lynne Heller created a Research Wall in the host lab, the Data Materialization Studio. The Research Wall facilitated a visual and research creation approach to the data collected and the theoretical stances being explored.