You don't have to be a rock star to want an engaged and attentive audience. So when ECUAD professor Glen Lowry saw deqq, a social media tool created by the Vancouver-based company Work at Play for rock stars like David Usher and Nelly Furtado, he recognized its potential for the classroom. Lowry and fellow professor Joy James have partnered with Work at Play to adapt deqq for use in their English 101 course and a graduate seminar, where it's supporting Twitter-like conversations among students. Through the deployment of deqq in the Emily Carr classroom, industry partner Work at Play has the opportunity to assess and develop deqq's potential for the post-secondary education sector and other markets.  Students are very comfortable with new ways of learning using social media tools, and to the extent that the tools can lead to better educational outcomes, there will be a market for the tools with universities.  

Is it a laboratory or is it a retail store? It's a question that Dawn Whitworth, Emily Carr's Manager of Research, asked designers at lululemon lab. The lululemon lab is essentially a design studio and a retail store in one. And, with its commitment to sustainable design Whitworth recognized the potential for student led projects and designs. For the past three years Emily Carr students and grads have worked within lululemon's head office, lululemon lab and more recently lululemon's sister company ivivva. As part of a robust sustainability curriculum Prof Helene Day-Fraser has led research on lululemon's sustainabilty themes and displays, often teaching classes from lululemon lab. Offering a new pedagogical and applied research approach Day-Fraser and her students have designed and built traffic-stopping installations. 

Led by Prof. Jim Budd, ECUAD students are teaming up with local company GuardRFID to develop a tagging system using radio frequency identification (RFID) for BC Children's Hospital. They started off by evaluating a wide range of design opportunities, and then picking a few for prototype development.  Each prototype aims to improve patient experience, and reduce inefficiency and paperwork for clinicians.  The systems will be capable of tracking patients, clinicians, and equipment, and providing information for enterprise and mobile platforms.   This multiyear collaborative project will expand to other areas where the intelligent use of technology can lead to improvements in health care.  For GuardRFID, it is leading to redesigned RFID bracelets, to recommendations for a new generation of intermediate range RFID technology, and to redesigned user interfaces that can be deployed in their installations throughout the US.