Browsing “We Are VANCVR”

Our picks for TEDxVancouver: Kris Krug, Photographer

October 19, 2011

Vancouver is an amazing city, chock full of creative talent. WE ARE VANCVR is a simple, elegant way to showcase all that talent in one place. Every week we profile one individual from the VANCVR community.VANCVR.com is a Domain7 Labs project.

Recently, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.

We are huge TEDx fans, and we’re also huge fans of all the bright ideas generated by our city’s creative types. That’s why the team at Domain7 Labs started We Are VANCVR in the first place—to bring all this talent together for good and then see what emerges.

When TEDx returns for its third instalment in Vancouver on November 12, we would love to see some of that talent on stage. This is the fourth of five letters we’ll be posting to TEDx, with speaker recommendations from the We Are VANCVR community.

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It sometimes seems like Kris Krug is everywhere. If he’s not being retweeted across the Twittersphere or being consulted by local media, he’s speaking at Vancouver events or his name it showing up in publications like National Geographic, Wired and Time—not to mention all over this very blog. His profile is even immortalized at the east end of the Beatty Street mural.

tedxoilspill-2010-06-16-16-43-09-D31_4060

[photo by Duncan Davidson]

Little wonder, since Kris has both talent and a message. Seriously, this guy has something to say.

He’s become a known advocate for empowerment through open source technology—and some of you might have been lucky enough to hear his early Pecha Kucha Vancouver talk titled “Open media, open culture and open source” (PK5).

Kris’s own growth has run a curious parallel with the Web’s. He started building websites in 1995 —when graphical web browsers first came on the scene. Since then his career shadowed the growth of the Internet: forming an online magazine with Burnkit founder Josh Dunford, putting his web skills to work in PR, and eventually running an open-source software start-up in the Silicon Valley (well before most of us had heard of open source, let alone realized it was awesome).

Around that time Kris started playing with a camera as a way to reconnect with the world around him. “I was running a company that encouraged others to use the web to empower themselves, and using a camera as my proof point. I was saying: don’t be afraid of piracy—be afraid of irrelevance. That message would ring shallow if I didn’t have 50,000 photos available to public online. I use my photography to prove out these open source models.”

The more time he spent with …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

Our picks for TEDx Vancouver: Carson Ting and Mike Nowland, Designers

October 12, 2011

Recently, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.

When TEDx returns for its third instalment in Vancouver on November 12, we would love to see some of that talent on stage. This is the third of five letters we’ll be posting to TEDx, with speaker recommendations from the We Are VANCVR community.

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Carson Ting and Mike Nowland have some serious creative clout in this city. They met as art directors at Vancouver-based idea factory, Rethink Communications, but connected over their mutual love of fixed gear bikes and street art.

They have both moved on from Rethink—Carson to handle the Nike and Jordan accounts at Blast Radius, and Mike to form creative agency, Company Policy—but their partnership has taken on a life of its own.

Their first collaborative project—stop motion mural video, “404 Beach”—went viral, and their work has since ended up:

in the entrance to Invoke Media’s (Hootsuite) office
at the Memphis Film Festival
in the San Jose Tech Museum
on the pages of Idn Magazine
at the Vancouver Art Gallery
all over the Internet

This curious collaboration came out of …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

our picks for tedxvancouver: Trevor Meier, filmmaker

October 6, 2011

Recently, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.

When TEDx returns for its third instalment in Vancouver on November 12, we would love to see some of that talent on stage. This is the second of five letters we’ll be posting to TEDx, with speaker recommendations from the We Are VANCVR community.

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We introduced Trevor Meier a few weeks ago as a jack of all trades—he takes pictures, makes films, and dabbles in the web, design, and writing. He sums this all up is by calling himself a storyteller.

Trevor’s passion for story first emerged when he was getting beat up by “a gang of brute-armed 15-year-olds” in grade 8. “I started to wonder why people do what they do,” he says.

He refined this curiosity while producing his award-winning documentary, Rwanda: Hope Rises. The film looks at that country’s recovery from genocide through the story of a husband and wife—one a member of the Hutu tribe, and the other a Tutsi tribe member—and how they not only survived, but embodied the healing Rwanda has undergone in the last 15 years.

Since then he’s built his work around telling meaningful stories. His company, Storyspark, is in the business of finding the narratives of non-profits and social enterprise, and then telling those stories in a compelling way.

Bottom line, storytelling is foundational to what Trevor does on a daily basis. But he sees it as more than a marketing tool or entertainment mechanism—it’s a way to …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

Our picks for Tedxvancouver: Kara Pecknold, Designer

September 28, 2011

Last week, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.

When TEDx returns for its third installment in Vancouver on November 12, we would love to see some of that talent on stage. This is the first of five letters we’ll be posting to TEDx, with speaker recommendations from the We Are VANCVR community.
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Meet Kara Pecknold. She’s a specialist in human-centred design and spends lots of time developing tools for design research in other cultures.

Several years ago, as a Master of Applied Arts and Design student at Emily Carr, she was tasked with creating a website for a small business in Rwanda. “My work in Rwanda exposed flaws in how we develop design briefs in a cross-cultural environment—without shared language or assumed technology,” she explains.

Though her job was to create a website for a group of women who create and sell woven goods, her “clients” had no electricity and no distribution model.

She partnered with the women to collect data about how they perceive their actual needs. Because they don’t share a common language, she sent the women out with disposable cameras, note pads and pens to gather visual insights that would lead to something adaptable and usable in their context.

Her research revealed a need far more …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

WE ARE VANCVR: Daniel Sicolo, designer/photographer/illustrator

September 20, 2011

Vancouver is an amazing city, chock full of creative talent. WE ARE VANCVR is a simple, elegant way to showcase all that talent in one place. Every Tuesday we profile one individual from the VANCVR community.VANCVR.com is a Domain7 Labs project, inspired by PRTLND.com.

Daniel Sicolo fits into lots of creative categories but the VANCVR team is pretty partial to his illustrations. His work is fun and fresh and just the right amount of cheeky. In addition to making pretty things, he maintains a fairly awesome blog where he posts his weekly Monday’s Suck playlist, sure to push all you other Vancouver creatives through that post-weekend slump. Read on to find out why he likes being a creative in Vancouver.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

WE ARE VANCVR: Brent Freedman, designer

September 13, 2011

Brent Freedman is not your average creative type. It’s hard to slot him into any single category, or even three or four categories. This guy does a bit of everything and then a bit of that other stuff too, and somehow all of it is just plain cool. Scroll down to find out why he likes being a creative in Vancouver, and then check out his super diverse portfolio of music, photography, miniature modelling, etc, etc, etc!

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR