Futureland 2 is an enhanced version of Futureland 1. It focuses on balancing both qualitative and quantitative tracking approach, while being a fast and beautiful native iOS app that allows users to track their own progress across habits, projects, and interests, share that with a close group of friends or create challenges to increase accountability.

Collaborators

Lucas Fischer

Engineer

Kent De Bruin

Designer

New maps and amplifies the patterns that make cities more creatively productive. The project currently has a hyper focus on Toronto and its surrounding areas.

Our process seeks to form a fundamental understanding of needs, then address those needs by creating new systems, communities, and infrastructure, observing the effects, and then sharing the learning and insights more broadly with the city's citizens.

Collaborators

John Doe

Lead Developer

Jane Smith

Designer

New Builds is a new kind of hackathon event in Toronto that combines intensive project development with a unique team formation process. It features a sports-style draft night, followed by a 48 hour hackathon, where participants create new technology projects. The event aims to foster new collaborations, realize unique ideas, and strengthen Toronto's technology and creative communities.

A new event series in Toronto that blends art, technology, games, (and soon food) into a single experience. The project aims to create a unique celebration of work that is distinctly Toronto-centric, avoiding derivative cultural influences.

We've hosted two successful New Demos, with New Demos 2 being bigger than New Demos 1. Each New Demos aspires to contribute the Toronto's culture and storytelling in its own way. This series has resonated locally and beyond.

Description of the mobile app sub-project...

Detailed description of the team formation process and draft night mechanics...

Detailed description of the 48-hour hackathon process and development phase...

Detailed description of the community showcase event and final presentation process...

A unique hackathon in Toronto that combines intensive project development with a sports-style draft night for team formation. This new team formation mechanic effectively encourages cross pollination of skills and perspective in the ecosystem. Then Participants engage in a 48-hour hackathon to create new technology projects and share widely with the broader community.

Likely one of the most successful and impactful hackathon projects in Toronto's history. Increased cross-pollination between Toronto, Waterloo, and beyond. Set the stage for New Builds 2.

Detailed description of the draft night process...

New Demos 2 built on what we learned from our first event, this time at Toronto's Revue Cinema. Artists, developers, and designers showed their work in a simple but effective way: they sat at small desks while their screens filled the movie theatre behind them.

The theatre setting changed everything. Mouse movements became huge, visuals and sound filled the space. The end effect was that the audience was more absored by hte experience, and watched very closely as each person shared their work.

New Demos 2 brought Toronto's technology and art communities closer together, resulting in many new side effects, and an overall new level of momentum that became the foundation for the next set of projects.

A series of videos created to explain various aspects of Futureland 2's product features and overall vision. These videos serve as both marketing material and user guides, helping to communicate the platform's functionality and purpose to a wider audience.

These videos help to clarify Futureland 2's unique value proposition, showcase new features, and articulate the long-term vision of the platform. They play a crucial role in user onboarding and community engagement.

An improved version of Futureland that grew from a Slack community into a full daily tracking platform. It started as a place for people to learn new skills by practicing for 365 days straight and evolved into a tool where users could track their habits, projects, and experiments using a mix of habit tracking and visual journaling.

A short film for FUTURELAND that explores the process of self learning. The film aims to draw attention to questions around how we learn and imagines a future with thoughtful tools and resources for self-directed learning in a rapidly changing world.

A year-long experiment in music creation, where I created some kind of music every day for 365 consecutive days. This project resulted in 21 hours of continuous music and prior to this experiment I had not made any music before.

After making music for 365 days, I realized this could be a very effective way of learning new things, so I decided to learn programming by writing code for 365 consecutive days.

This experiment, along with the music project and my prior experience with filmmaking made me start to believe that I could explore any medium, and I should. It solidified that the most important things to me is continuous learning, rapid creation, and breaking self-imposed creative limits.

A global community of technocreatives focused on 365-day learning challenges across various disciplines. Before midnight individuals would publish daily creations through a SlackBot named Otis, which uploaded content to a web interface for tracking their progress. Disciplines explored included coding, visual art, music production, game development, hardware projects, and a lot more.

Futureland Zero had a transformative effect on those that completed their 365 day projects, leading to new opportunities, relationships, and ideas. This project also became the foundation for Futureland as a startup, leading to multiple iterations and versions since its inception.

Established and led an internal studio for Shopify's storytelling, focusing on developing diverse narrative capabilities. The studio produced documentary films, animated content, and original productions to enhance Shopify's storytelling on all levels.

FURTHER is an original animated series exploring the intersection of science and humanity. The project involved working with experts from SETI, NASA, CRISPR, and other cutting-edge scientific fields.

Led the creative direction for Shopify's IPO, creating a documentary about the company's origins and growth. This was a high-stakes project, completed on a short timeline, had to find a way to make it feel like a film while seamlessly integrated key business details.

The documentary was highly successful, effectively communicating Shopify's story and contributing to a successful IPO. This marked the first time a Canadian company used video in their IPO process. It was the first project I worked on at Shopify, and I think it set a high standard for future storytelling efforts, paving the way for expanded narrative capabilities within the company.

A documentary film exploring the hip hop scene in Alaska. The film delves into the lives and music of Alaskan rappers, including Josh Boots, and examines the past, current, and future state of the Alaskan hip hop scene.