From AI to wearable tech to inclusive design: seed grants support OCAD U researchers

Six OCAD University researchers have received seed grant funding to support research projects that are addressing real-world challenges, including one that is exploring how AI may overlook or misrepresent the histories and cultural identities of communities, particularly those of the Black diaspora.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Explore Research Seed Grants were awarded by OCAD U’s Office of Research and Innovation, drawn from funding the University receives from the SSHRC Institutional Grant. Each recipient has received $5,000.

Among the six projects is one that is developing a vibrotactile electronics toolkit that will include specially designed circuit boards to make it easier for people to connect vibration motors and incorporate them into creative projects, including wearable technology and interactive art. Another project aims to provide designers and institutions with a clearer, evidence-informed basis for considering how outdoor spaces can be more inclusive, supportive and environmentally responsive.

RECIPIENTS AND THEIR PROJECTS

Angela Bains, Associate Professor and Chair, Advertising
Faculty of Design
Project: “The Future of African Typography: Reimagining African Writing Systems into Design Futures”

This research project is exploring how ancient Africa's rich history of written and visual communication can inspire modern typography, digital design and new forms of creative expression.

From books and websites to advertising and public signs, typography plays a central role in how we communicate. Yet the history of typography taught in universities has largely focused on European traditions, often overlooking Africa's sophisticated writing systems and cultural knowledge. This research project aims to change that by examining how historical African scripts, including Nsibidi and Ge'ez, can be reimagined for contemporary design.

The project asks an important question: How can African archived knowledge preserved in colonial collections be transformed into living design that contributes to future innovation?

The specific objectives are to:

• Create a phase one documentation of African writing systems;
• Investigate how emerging technologies, including AI, variable fonts, immersive media, ma support new forms of African typographic expression;
• Develop original artworks demonstrating how African typographic knowledge can inform future design;
• Contribute to scholarship on design futures, decoloniality, and visual communication; and
• General materials to develop future curriculum, pedagogical resources and artifacts.

The research seeks to challenge longstanding gaps in design education by making African writing systems more visible and accessible to students, designers and the broader public. Ultimately, the project aims to demonstrate that Africa's writing traditions are more than historical achievements. They are valuable sources of creativity and innovation that can help shape how future generations communicate, design and share knowledge.

Maya Mahgoub Desai, Associate Professor
Faculty of Design
Project: “Healthy Landscapes: Institutional Outdoor Space as Social and Environmental Infrastructure”

From schoolyards to hospital grounds and social housing courtyards, this research project explores how outdoor spaces shape people’s everyday lives. Specifically, it investigates how outdoor environments relate to well-being, social connection, accessibility, inclusion, comfort, autonomy and refuge.

Research across schools, health care and residential settings has explored how outdoor environments relate to well-being, social experiences and access to nature. However, differences in research methods and settings make it challenging to identify shared qualities and context-specific needs.

Building on this research and design precedents, the project will develop a comparative framework and apply it through visual and spatial analysis of three exploratory Toronto case studies: a school, a health care setting and a social-housing setting. It will also examine how qualities combine spatially and where evidence is limited or context dependent.

The project asks: Which spatial, ecological, sensory and institutional qualities of outdoor environments are associated in existing research with everyday well-being, social connection, inclusion, autonomy, comfort and refuge across these settings, and which appear to require setting-specific responses?

The project’s objectives are to:

• Conduct a structured review of research and design precedents across schools, health care settings and social housing, focusing on outdoor-space qualities associated with well-being, social connection, inclusion, comfort, autonomy and refuge;
• Develop a comparative framework identifying qualities that recur across settings, those that may be setting-specific, their relationships, and gaps or inconsistencies in the evidence;
• Apply the framework through mapping and visual/spatial analysis of three exploratory Toronto case studies: one school, one health care setting and one social-housing setting; and
• Produce the framework and case studies to inform discussions with prospective institutional partners, a potential March 2027 SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant application, and future research.

Ultimately, the research aims to provide designers and institutions with a clearer, evidence-informed basis for considering how outdoor spaces can be more inclusive, supportive and environmentally responsive.

Desai is leading the project with Dr. Butler and Dr. Harden providing focused in-kind advisory input as collaborators. Dr. Butler is advising on health equity, environmental and social determinants of health, interpreting well-being-related evidence, and translating findings into institutionally relevant, equity-responsive research priorities. Dr. Harden is advising on ecological and landscape conditions.

Kate Hartman (applicant), Associate Professor, Co-director and founder of Social Body Lab, Faculty of Arts and Science, Juan Sulca (collaborator), OCAD U graduate in Digital Futures
Faculty of Arts and Science
Project: “Buzz Bites”

From the buzz of early pagers to the subtle vibrations of today's smartphones, technology that communicates through touch has come a long way. But for artists, designers and electronics enthusiasts, working with tiny vibration motors can still be surprisingly difficult.

“Buzz Bites” is a vibrotactile electronics toolkit that will include specially designed circuit boards to make it easier to connect vibration motors and incorporate them into creative projects, including wearable technology and interactive art. Users can experiment with different techniques, from soldering electronic components to sewing circuits into fabric or using conductive tape. The research will inform an application for certification of these vibe boards from the Open Source Hardware Association.

The objectives of this proposal are to:

• Produce an annotated bibliography of non-consumer haptic toolkits;
• Analyze the outcomes of four Buzz Bites workshops that took place between May through October 2026;
• Deliver an online workshop for previous Buzz Bite participants on how to modify custom printed circuit board designs for their own applications;
• Design, manufacture, and test a final version of Buzz Bites printed circuit boards; and
• Disseminate finding via a submission for a peer-reviewed human-computer interaction conference.

This research reflects Hartman’s broader approach to wearable technology: rather than treating wearables as sealed consumer products, she focuses on opening up their circuitry and code so people can experiment, remix and create their own devices.

Ésery Mondésir, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Art
Project: “Kay Tout Moune II: Provocations for Unfolding Worlds”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to translate languages, recognize images and preserve information. But as these technologies become more common in everyday life, are they overlooking the voices, cultures and experiences that make us unique?

This research project is examining how AI systems, which are trained to recognize patterns in large amounts of data, may risk overlooking the unique languages, histories and cultural experiences of marginalized communities, particularly those of the Black diaspora. Drawing on the ideas of Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant (Poetics of Relation and Tout-Monde), who championed cultural diversity and the right of people to maintain their distinct identities, the project challenges how AI technologies are designed and used.

The project’s objectives are to: 

• Develop the conceptual framework and literature base that situate the inquiry, articulating the tension between statistical convergence in AI systems and Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation;
• Build the network of presenters, partners, and participants in a series of three-talks and a community happening, across fields that rarely convene together; and
• Produce a submission-ready SSHRC Connection Grant application.

With AI already playing a growing role in education, cultural institutions and everyday communication, the project aims to spark important conversations about how technology can recognize and preserve the diversity of human expression rather than diminish it.

Dr. Suzanne Morrissette, Associate Professor
Faculty of Arts and Science
Project: “BIPOC/Racialized Artist-led Projects: Recent and Current Access to Public Funds”

Despite efforts in recent years to make Canada’s arts sector more diverse and inclusive, many Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC)/racialized artists continue to face barriers to opportunities, funding and recognition.

To better understand the contexts impacting the support for BIPOC/racialized artist-led, social justice-based projects, this research project aims to answer the key question: How are emerging and established artist-led projects in Canada led by BIPOC/racialized artists able or challenged to access federal, provincial, and municipal resources towards social justice-informed projects in the present?

Through a series of interviews with individuals whose lived experiences, knowledge and leadership are reflected in the arts, including representatives at emerging and established artist-led projects, the research project will take the pulse of the multi-layered, socio-economic and cultural conditions under which Canadian arts funding gets distributed. This research is designed to reveal the values and ideas which enable and challenge artist-led social justice informed projects today.

Dr. Anna Stielau, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Arts and Science
Project: “Rerouting: South African Art and/as Infrastructure”

From power outages and water shortages to unreliable public transportation, South Africans face daily challenges caused by aging infrastructure and unequal access to essential services.

Dr. Stielau’s research project explores how artists respond to these conditions by inventing new modes of making that double as alternative infrastructures: rerouting water systems, repurposing waste, adapting darkrooms to work around blackouts, establishing community seed libraries, and building provisional systems of circulation in cases where public transit comes up short.

To date, infrastructure studies have largely approached underlying systems from the vantage point of their social and political effects, while materialist art history tends to locate infrastructure before and behind the artwork as a problem of production.

“Rerouting” brings these two conversations together by asking, instead, what happens when infrastructure itself acts as an artistic medium, constraint, and method, and how art-making might begin to function infrastructurally in return.

The project’s objectives are to:

• Investigate two new case studies of South African artists working directly with failing and/or contested local infrastructure;
• Test a site-responsive method combining archival research, studio visits, photographic documentation, and close aesthetic analysis; and
• Generate preliminary evidence to support an application to the SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

“Rerouting” extends Dr. Stielau’s research in her first-book project on artists’ interventions in temporal systems into a focused investigation of material systems, anchored in longstanding relationships with southern African artists and institutions.