Greg Van Alstyne

At OCAD University I'm Associate Professor, Faculty of Design; and co-founding Director of Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab).

I'm a futurist, educator, and researcher with more than twenty-five years of experience in communication and service design, creative direction and strategy. I have developed graphic, environmental, interaction and foresight projects for brands, firms, public and NFP organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia. I'm a frequent lecturer at national and international events.

My research interests include 'designing with emergence' (how design and emergence interact in complex socio-technical systems), media futures, and the future of reading, writing, and publishing.

In the OCAD U SF&I Masters program I have (co)taught Business & Design Thinking, Foresight Studio and Innovation Research Methods. My undergrad courses at OCAD University have included Experience Design, Think Tank (design and social responsibility), Typeface Design, and Time Motion Media. I've completed graduate work in media law, intellectual property, philosophy and history of digital media, physical computing, and the semantic Web.

Accomplishments at sLab include: co-founder DesignJam; co-investigator in Economic Futures for Ontario 2032 for the OPS; Digital Governance (SSRHC); Urban Futures panel in Imagining Canada's Future (SSHRC); and iCity, led by Sara Diamond's Visual Analytics Lab. I've led Visualizing Emergence, a data visualization project within CIVDDD; and co-authored a set of papers with Dr Robert K Logan, including the sBook project, Designing for Emergence, and The Design Ecosystem. I lead the Media Futures Research Group at sLab, and I was co-PI with Suzanne Stein for the open foresight project, 2020 Media Futures.

Prior to my appointment at OCAD University, I was the inaugural director of the Institute without Boundaries, a post-graduate, interdisciplinary design program established by Bruce Mau Design and George Brown College. I directed and mentored student teams in the conception, development, and production of the transmedia project, Massive Change: The Future of Global Design. In the 1990s I founded the Department of New Media at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where I co-produced the first MoMA Web site, data-driven environments in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, and other interaction design projects.