Centre for Creative Business Innovation (CCBI)

Jennifer Gordon Director, Centre for Creative Business Innovation (CCBI) & Humber Galleries

CENTRE FOR CREATIVE BUSINESS INNOVATION (CCBI) serves as a nexus for research-creation, critical thinking, and business innovation. Building on Humber’s strengths in facilities, resources, and talent, it fosters collaboration across all disciplines to find solutions that can be subsequently implemented and commercialized. CCBI is a hub for problem solvers, where they work with industry partners to help build and manage teams of students and faculty experts. In an era of digital disruption and growing competitive pressures, creativity is a key driver of competitive advantage and business success.

CCBI works in lockstep with Humber Galleries, who run two of our five Fellowships, as well as provide intra and extracurricular support, workshops, and spaces for celebration and experimentation throughout Humber campuses. Together, we work toward our vision of Campus As A Canvas, showcasing our community and its creativity all over our spaces!

Humber Galleries is a non-profit contemporary art organization whose multi-disciplinary approach to exhibitions and programming serves Humber College’s polytechnic model of education and our local Toronto communities. Our exhibition sites include our main L Space Gallery, pop-up locations across Lakeshore and North campuses, and several different online offerings. Humber Galleries is an active collaborator in the educational fabric of the College, promoting critical thinking and increased student involvement in all our projects.

The Creative Cluster is growing faster than the rest of the economy along with rising demand for skilled talent in creative industries. The creative economy is a major source of GDP, contributing $26.7 billion to Ontario’s economy and over 275,000 jobs.

The Cultural Hub and the CCBI/Humber Galleries will contribute to Ontario’s talent pipeline in the creative industries and act as a catalyst for building the next generation of artistic, cultural and creative leaders.

Did you know? Both artistic and scientific research processes are profoundly similar. Both create a hypothesis or research question, create conditions to test those concepts, observe, record and adjust those conditions and arrive at an outcome. Instead of creating a new medicine or an academic paper, think of the outcome of the creative process as the “work of art.” Academic research within the arts is referred to as…

Research in digital media and the performing and fine arts is a key part of our mandate. While research within artistic fields has not been historically privileged by Canada’s Tri-Council granting agencies and is new to Humber as well, the CCBI is strongly committed to supporting artists and creators at Humber and in the community. A current focus is on ‘ResearchCreation,’ or the interaction between artistic practice, theory and applied research. In this approach, research activity incorporates a creative process, or vice-versa, to produce a final work that uses a variety of media and is critically informed.

Under a Research-Creation framework, we ask questions, examine issues using multi-disciplinary techniques and present our findings in creative ways. For example, we might obtain historical records through old photographs or oral histories, use street photography to examine questions around urbanization, visualize data through music and sonograms, and present findings in the form of a short play or creative writing.

We are also using Research-Creation to encourage critical thinking and a research mentality in college-and undergraduate-courses. We are actively exploring which activities encourage student collaboration across disciplines and how we can apply these lessons across Humber’s academic curriculum. We aim to help legitimize the research effort that goes into creative work by helping artists identify, collect and analyze their creation process. In turn, we want Humber students to think of themselves as emerging professional artists and researchers.

We used two 2021 Fellowships (Nuit Blanche Fellowship and Intercultural & Creative Music Fellowship) as pilot studies to examine the following questions:

1. How do multi-disciplinary teams collaborate to achieve a common goal? Participants are Humber students from an array of programs. As a result, they will have different approaches, interpretations and methodologies when presented with the initial project question and parameters. Through observation and assessment over a period of 14 weeks, we can determine how students with different backgrounds collaborate to create a single outcome.

2. How can “Research-Creation” be incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum? Currently, the research-creation concept is applied within graduatelevel education. However, there is ample room and opportunity for these concepts to be introduced and included within college and undergraduate education. Observational methods and data analytics will be used to determine which techniques, questions and activities generate the most student engagement, and these will be re-examined in future studies.

3. How can we measure “Research-Creation”? Many studies on research-creation have collected qualitative data or anecdotes from participants. Our goal is to collect quantitative/numerical data on the researchcreation process used by participants. By focussing on two aspects of research-creation (Chapman & Sawchuk’s (2012) “research-for-creation” and “creative presentations of research”), we can assess how students’ research skills and comprehension change over the 14-week fellowship.

The CCBI & Humber Galleries run five Fellowships that take place over 14 weeks each summer.

The Fellowships are unique and prestigious paid WorkIntegrated Learning opportunities for Humber College students. This is a new model of interdisciplinary learning, combining Humber’s three Strategic Pillars with Humber’s defined Learning Outcomes (HLO) to create professional, work-ready graduates.

The five Fellowships demanded collaboration across disciplines, high levels of excellence, and the development and application of transferable skills.

During Summer 2021, thirty-three students (across two faculties and twelve programs) worked in collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. Under the guidance of a creative producer (faculty or external) and a CCBI team lead, these students gained real-world experience in creative research practices and the development of an original creative artifact.

These Fellowships improved key mindsets in inter-cultural and creative systems thinking while encouraging students to implement Humber’s HLO framework.

This summer, we are proudly partnered with the City of Toronto on three of these:

• Tiny Town Internship, where students come together to envision and prototype a renewed, accessible model and its digital twin for the current 30-year-old miniature replica that sits in City Hall

• Culture’s Compass, a two-day conference programmed and executed by students that will act as an extension of CivicLabTO’s Cultural Recovery research arm

• Nuit Blanche Fellowship, where students create one artistic outcome based on the Artistic Director’s curatorial statement called The Space Between Us. Catch all the Nuit Blanche outcomes on Humber’s Lakeshore Campus this fall as we act as Institutional Host for Nuit Blanche in Etobicoke, a first for the City and Humber!

In addition, we run two other Fellowships that focus on intercultural identity and collaboration:

• The Indigenous Transmedia Fellowship and, x

• Partnered with the Aga Khan Museum, The Intercultural and Creative Music Fellowship.

Looking to get involved with some of the CCBI’s exciting offerings? Check out the handy diagram, created by Sarah English and Bianca di Pietro, our CCBI Faculty Ambassadors!

We offer Design Jams, Charettes, COIL opportunities, Speaker Series, and more!

Jennifer Gordon, MFA, BFA, BEd (She/Her)

Director, Centre for Creative Business Innovation & Humber Galleries, Faculty of Media & Creative Arts

linkedin.com/in/jennifer-gordon-86856ba

jennifer.gordon@humber.ca

Jennifer Gordon holds a studio BFA in Drawing & Painting and a BEd in I/S Visual Arts & English, both from the University of Ottawa. She also holds a graduate certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. An advocate for sustainable growth in the Canadian arts and cultural sectors, Jennifer has held roles in business development and training, arts administration, and consulted from the local to international levels in recruitment and organisational development for the cultural industries. Most recently she serves as Co-Chair for Cultural Recovery for the City of Toronto as part of CivicLabTO, an ongoing research consortium between the City and GTA post-secondary institutions, for which she also sits on the Steering Committee.