Date: Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Venue: Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen St. West
Time: 7-10pm

Schedule:
7pm – Welcome & contest start
8pm – Contest judging, by our expert panel
8:15pm – Ignites
10pm – Wrap

Speakers:

Leigh Honeywell @hypatiadotca – Fresh Immersion

Leigh Honeywell usually breaks things, and sometimes makes things. She’s spent a year working with folks to build a real-world community, and has been getting her feet wet in a couple of free software communities as well. This Ignite is about the things she’s learned.

By day, she works at a large security vendor in their Software-as-a-Service group, as a Malware Operations Engineer. By night (and sometimes on her lunchbreaks) she’s a fourth-ish year part time student at the University of Toronto, working on a BSc in Computer Science and Equity Studies, with the latter being about equity as in equality, not as in finance. She also co-founded and helps run a non-profit hacker space in Kensington Market called HackLab.To. It’s pretty awesome, you should check it out. They even have a neon sign.

Michael Anton Dila @michaeldila – Women, Fire & Dangerous Things

Michael co-founded Torch Partnership with Robin Uchida in 2006. Together, they shape strategic conversations and help their clients create organizational confidence so that they can confront their “wicked problems”.

Michael is one of the founders of Overlap, an annual, peer-to-peer gathering for those working at the center of emerging theory, methods and practices of innovation. He is Chief Strategist of Strategic Innovation Lab at the Ontario College or Art & Design and also the chief catalyst of the Unfinished Business initiative.

Matthew Milan @mmilan – The New Strategy
Somewhere in the last 20 years, we started to suck at strategy. Everyone added ’strategist’ to their job title, and started giving advice to peers, teams and companies on what they should do next. The thing is, it’s no longer about what you do next, it’s about what you do now. The New Strategy will challenge your definition of what strategy is, and suggest that strategy we thought we knew, never really existed.

Matthew is a designer and entrepreneur who likes to get his hands dirty in as many places as possible. Currently this means a mix of experience design, service design and strategy, but in the past he’s designed everything from spatial technology to ski hills. He is currently a Partner at Normative, a Toronto-based design and strategy studio that helps companies make their products, services and experiences relevant and valuable in an increasingly complex world.

Ryan Coleman @ryancoleman – Designing for visual efficiency

Just reading this description unleashes a complex process to help your mind understand what your eyes are looking at. Together, our brain and eyes run through these processes millions upon millions of times daily, all without us even being aware of it. “Designing for Visual Efficiency” looks at the process of how we see and how that knowledge allows you to create designs that are visually efficient.

Ryan Coleman is an entrepreneur, facilitator and information designer from Toronto, ON. Through interactive workshops, facilitated sessions and/or consulting projects Ryan works with clients to organize and refine their ideas and shape them into a common vision that they can act on and share clearly, concisely & consistently. Ryan is also a founding member and Chief Community Evangelist for VizThink, a global community of visual thinkers & practitioners.

Matt Ratto @mattratto – Why Johnny Can’t Read an iPhone: Using critical making to teach socio-technical literacy

In the 1950’s educators and parents connected poor literacy rates to how reading was taught in schools. ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ was one result – a book that advocated not just new strategies for education, but new ways of organizing educational institutions. Currently, we have a different reading problem – most people have a limited ability to ‘read’ technologies, to evaluate the social, cultural, and environmental ramifications of their adoption and use. This literacy problem is similar to the one that came before and requires not just individual discovery but institutional innovation. Critical Making is a practice that highlights these issues and poses some solutions.

Matt Ratto is an Assistant Professor and director of the Critical Making lab in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on how hands-on productive work – making – can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. Since 2007, Ratto has carried out workshops in ‘critical making’ in Amsterdam, London, Canada, the US, and Scotland.

Sam Ladner @sladner – Designing Technology for Social Selves

Many of us are familiar with the Freudian elements of self: id, ego and superego. Freud’s conception is biological, however, not social. George Herbert Mead offers us a social notion of self made up of the “I,” the “me” and the “generalized other.” I’ll show how Mead’s concept of self helps us understand technology design in today’s socially-driven software and web environment.

Sam Ladner is a sociologist with an interest in technology, work and organizations. She has mixed private-sector consulting work with academic research and teaching. Using a range of methods including interviewing, observation and ethnography, she consults on digital product design, organizational change, and the social aspects of technological innovation. She holds a PhD in sociology from York University. She currently works for her own firm as consultant and principal with Copernicus Consulting Group.

Matt Nish-Lapidus @emenel – Design for Ritual

Throughout history, ritual has played an important part in society. It is sought out by individuals in many different ways, from the profound to the mundane. How do designers working on new products and services tap into the desire for ritual to improve engagement and enjoyment? Matt is, in no particular order, a designer, music nerd, cyclist, and critic. Along with a dedicated team, Matt is a local leader for the Interaction Design Association. He currently works as a designer and consultant at nForm User Experience based out of Toronto and Edmonton.

Erin Bury @erin_bury

After cutting her teeth managing public relations for fortune 500 tech companies, Erin joined Sprouter to better utilize her passion for networking, community-building & Web 2.0 technologies. As Community Manager, Erin is the voice of the Sprouter community of entrepreneurs – the connector between Sprouter and the world at large; providing ongoing communication in both directions.
A journalism grad who loves all things social media, Erin was one of the co-organizers of Twestival Toronto.

Rohan Jayasekera – @RohanSJ – Socionomics

What if much of what you read in the newspaper has the causes and effects backward? This Ignite is about Socionomics, a relatively new field that looks into how mass social mood governs what we wear (fashion), what we watch (movies), how we invest (the stock market), who we vote for (democracy), and the entire economy.

Rohan’s been developing online products and services for a few decades, including co-founding Sympatico, the world’s first mass-market Internet service.  He has many interests, including training as a psychotherapist.  He likes cats.  He dislikes elitism, dishonesty, and groupthink.

Jay Goldman @jaygoldman

Community is a hot buzzword bingo property these days, but what does it actually mean? Jay will draw on lots of real world examples to explore how communities form and what we can learn from them as designers and builders.

Jay is helping to lead the feedback revolution as the Head of Marketing for Rypple. He’s spent more than 10 years in the tech trenches as a designer and user experience professional, has written for the Harvard Business Review, authored the O’Reilly Facebook Cookbook, and has been one of the stewards of the TorCamp community since its inception in 2005. Jay hosts the weekly Mr. Mobile video podcast for Butterscotch.com, tweets as @jaygoldman, and occasionally blogs at jaygoldman.com.

Corey Reid @barsoomcore -  How Product Development is like Kung Fu, with many informative illustrations from the works of Jackie Chan and others.
Kung-fu movies and software development: what does the one have to tell us about the other? Hopefully, more than you might think at first glance.

Years ago, an itinerant Tokyo film critic left his entire collection of Hong Kong cinema (in a collection of brown paper bags) to young Corey Reid. This sparked an obsession with graceful leaps, bone-crushing falls and strange poses that remains undimmed to this day. Shortly after this obsession kicked off, Corey found himself in the software industry and found it equally fascinating. He has led project teams for software companies across Canada and currently runs the development team at FreshBooks here in Toronto. He wears cowboy boots, teaches Japanese swordsmanship and thinks Twitter is pretty neat.

Justin Kozuch @jkozuch - Lessons Learned in Community  Building

A presentation about the basics of community, some examples of successful communities, and some tips on how to build them.

Justin Kozuch is the founder of Refresh Events, and works behind the scenes bringing together the most engaging and influential minds in Toronto’s vibrant technology scene. During the day, he can be found reading social media marketing blogs, promoting Refresh Events to the community, and networking with industry superstars. In a previous lifetime, he worked as an Interactive Developer, and worked with large brands such as RIM, the Wall Street Journal and Virgin Charter. His claim to fame was once helping find Mayor David Miller a napkin.