Monday, April 24, 2017

Step into the light with #FITC Toronto 2017

The Future of Innovation, Technology and Creativity is waiting to be explored at the downtown Hilton during the 16th annual event in Toronto. They ask if you want to be inspired, learn or experience some amazing technology and if the answer is yes, it is time to consider making FITC part of your future. This year's event is only on from Sunday, April 23 to Tuesday, April 25 but the three days are crammed with speakers that can tap your curiosity and bring direction to your creative path.

"FITC Toronto is a professional celebration of the best the world has to offer in design, digital development, media and innovation in creative technologies – three days and nights of presentations, parties, installations and performances that unite and transform the industry. The event explores the future of everything innovative, technical and creative to leave you informed, challenged and inspired. With hand-picked speakers from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds; whether you’re after a highly focused experience, or your interests are more interdisciplinary, we’ve got you covered."

I watched Anouk Wipprecht (pictured at top) discuss "The Intersection of Fashion, Robotics and Technology" as she closed out the first day. Her fashions combine technology and science to create garments that are interactive works of art. One of her dresses - The Spider, aggressively guards the wearer's personal space, another is the Cocktail Dress which you can actually use to make gin and tonic cocktails. It was going to appear later that night at the fitc party. She likes to twist the mind as she re-imagines fashion in the 'age of Digitalisation'.

Anouk started learning fashion design because she thought it was cool and now seeks to gamify fashion to make it fun. She worked with Audi to make outfits that were badass incorporating parts of the car into the dress. Her unicorn headset comes with a camera and monitors the body and hopes to help children with ADHT. Some of her fashion uses CO2 laser printing. The powder 3d printing provides a flexible, rubbery material which can be sculpted as required.

More than 75 presenters cover such areas as coding, development, creativity, development, business, marketing and hardware. And like a record they joke there is an A and a B-side to this conference, but the B-side rocks as well and the bar was open. It was hard to beat the lineup of companies showing off at fitc including NASA JPL, Google, MIT and Mozilla among many others. This show is for creatives, technologists, executives and marketers.
Olaf making his presentation

I missed several fascinating sounding seminars such as "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Time-Travellers", "Everything I Know About Design Leadership I Learned Coaching Youth Baseball" and "New Tech X Old Tech" but took a dip in the pool when I attended "Master of None" by Olaf Blomerus in the B-Side. The award winning filmmaker discusses his journey into VFX & VR. Olaf talked about understanding what you don't know to learning something everyday, focused on items that provide at least on other benefit from just simply learning (the rule of two), it must help his mission to improve his craft as well. He finished with four sayings: Learn more to do more, do more to know more, know more to do less, do less to do well.

 
Day 2 has over 23 seminars like "Calling Voyager: Interface Design for NASA's Deep Space Network", "The Future of Motion Design" and "Beyond Reality: Shaping the Future of Immersive Projects". The final day has such gems as "Why Looking at Failure Leads to Success", "How We Built a Bot for FITC" and "Reinventing Normal". You get to pick out what you want to see so choose wisely grasshopper.
Besides the entertaining and informative seminars you can also spend time in the expo, check out some of the vendors, make some origami, solder some circuit boards and spend time in the recharge room, which comes with some individual tents.

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