A Summer Remotely
Unlike last summer, by the time this summer began at CIMS we’d had a little bit of practice working from home. Like last summer though, it was another successful one. This term’s projects ranged from Carleton’s Digital Campus, a digital recreation of Carleton University’s campus with the potential to become a digital twin and a multiplayer video game, to NAC@50+; an interactive experience in-the-making centered on Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. Over the past 16 weeks our team of 70 researchers have worked from eight different time zones on 15 different projects. It’s safe to say that despite another summer of almost entirely remote work, we’ve kept busy. We also managed to bring the spirit of working at the lab to the digital workspace through our bi-weekly lab meetings!
The theme of this summer’s Zoom-based lab meetings was “Lab & Learn”. At each meeting, lab researchers gave a tutorial about a workflow used at CIMS. Each workflow came from one of our four streams of inquiry: digitization, modelling, digitally assisted fabrication, and digitally assisted storytelling. These meetings gave everyone in the lab some insight into the research taking place on other projects. The meetings were typically capped off with a Q&A period focused on a prompt question or a reading, giving everyone in the lab the opportunity to participate in the discussion.
Our blogs were thematically similar to our lab meetings to aid in learning about CIMS’ work and our four streams of inquiry (see above). It was a CIMS summer of learning. We’ve shared outlines of all four of our streams and detailed the specifics of projects within each stream. We hope that anyone who is curious about the work CIMS does will be able to look to these blogs for information and reference.
This fall, the CIMS blog format will be changing. We’ve decided to save blogs for big projects and important lab updates. We will be ramping down blog production a little bit so that they can be saved for content we feel is most relevant to our research. We’ve enjoyed putting out blogs bi-weekly, and the bi-weekly schedule has lent itself very well to this summer’s theme, but come this fall, we’re excited to embark on a change of pace. We are still very much dedicated to sharing our research and know that changing up our blog format will improve how we share our research.
Another change coming this fall is that the physical lab in the VSIM building at Carleton will be partially repopulated with CIMS team members! Following all Carleton COVID-19 protocols, we hope to welcome up to 30 lab members to work in the physical lab space with the remaining researchers continuing to work remotely. This pandemic year has brought its challenges but our wonderful IT team has allowed us to continue working from home; we feel well-prepared to accommodate both in-person and remote work for fall term and into the future!
This summer was a successful one despite its challenges and we are very proud of everything CIMS has achieved. We hope you’ve enjoyed this summer’s blogs and we’re excited to see what the fall will bring. Remember that all of CIMS’ blogs will remain on our website, despite the upcoming changes in format. We will continue to post updates from our many projects on our Instagram (@thecimslab) and on the “Projects” section of the website. Here’s to a great summer at CIMS, and what will hopefully be an even better fall!