Christine McGlade

I'm a design professional with 35+ years in media production and management, both digital (serious game, website, app design) and broadcast. I have worked in creative production roles (director, interactive producer, service designer) at multiple media organizations. I think of myself as a technology-literate design thinking practitioner: a “Designer who Codes”. I've done a lot of work with public sector, media, and charitable organizations disrupted by digitalization.

My area of research interest is experience design and the impact of technology, in particular AI/machine learning on citizens. Designing multi-platform experiences for audiences was the primary creative practice underlying my work in user experience design and transmedia storytelling within the broadcast industry while in Senior Management at TVO. With the completion of a Masters degree, this work in the area of human centred/technology-driven experience design has expanded to include broader questions on the future of work and pedagogical frameworks to explore creative leadership. My research includes non traditional methods of dissemination such as web video, ‘design fiction’ including speculative design, and theatrical performance of the futures.

Transmedia Storytelling
In a professional context, and over a 7 year period, I commissioned, executive produced, and assisted with funding, revenue and relevance models, and experience design on over a dozen transmedia projects in the form of apps, immersive online storytelling experiences, digital documentaries, and serious games. My professional interest, and personal motivation, was to better understand how we might leverage the interactive, participatory nature of digital and computational media to better design audience experiences for deeper engagement with issues-based television programming.

The Future of Work
Research completed during the course of my Masters in Strategic Foresight and Innovation included a report on the Futures of the Canadian Cultural Economy with co investigators Kelly Payne, Annie Constantinescu, and Donna Dupont. The report used strategic foresight methodologies and has been a driver for present research into foresight as a key creative leadership capability. I collaborated with Stuart Candy, then-faculty at OCADU, and co-investigator Ryan Murphy, to design an ‘advertisement from the future’. This piece of Design Fiction was positioned as a recruiting tool for the “Mortal Union”, a fictitious future version of organized labour in a scenario in which human jobs would be scarce. The “Ad” was published in MISC magazine’s Summer 2017 issue on Women in the Workplace.

Technology-driven Social Impact
My masters thesis explored foresight methodology “The Three Horizons” (Sharpe) and impact framework Theory of Change. My argument focused on the ethical impacts of artificial intelligence, and the need for a re examination of digital (social) media data gathering and use outside an economic paradigm.

With co investigators Nenad Rava, Melissa Tuillo, and Leah Zaidi and under the research umbrella of OCADU’s sLab, we engaged the Toronto social innovation community in a series of generative design workshops, a panel, and a facilitated Three Horizons Foresight (Sharpe) workshop to investigate the Futures of Social Innovation Hubs in Toronto with a focus on the alignment of social innovation actvities with the UNDP’s sustainable development goals.

With co-investigator Debbie Gordon and the Kids Media Centre at Centennial College, I received National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) funding to research and prototype a series of games that would teach pre-reading children (ages 2-5) how to think computationally. Research included generative board game design workshops with students from The University of Toronto, Centennial College, and Ryerson and an REB-approved study with children ages 3-6 and early childhood educators to assess the effectiveness of the games and develop a unique experience design for STEM learning in pre-reading children.