Foreign Policy Camp
Simon Fraser University x Canada’s World
Vancouver, Canada
2009

Role:
Designer
Co-founder

Methods: 
Service design
Web design
Co-design

I co-founded Foreign Policy Camp collaboration with SFU Centre for Dialogue’s Shauna Sylvester and Sarah Van Borek of Canada’s World. The event was imagined as a “hybrid unconference” for public policy which would invite participants to experiment with new digital technologies that blended ‘live’ and ‘virtual’ components - a concept so new at the time that we had to provide a digital FAQ pack alongside the festival tickets. As the first hybrid conference of its kind in Canada, we began with a series of service design sessions to understand the needs of policymakers and other potential festival participants. These insights also informed my design of the website and the visual identity of the festival. The festival’s participatory interventions were launched across variety of digital platforms, from customised new media interfaces, multimedia labs and chat room sessions run by local civil society groups, to Twitter strolls, cross-city livestreams, flash mobs and live-recorded webcasts. We were joined on the day by over 300 policymakers, civil servants and students, and thousands of collaborators who participated live on the web from other cities across Canada. The process of organising Foreign Policy Camp was featured in a documentary in 2010.

Photos: RJ Aquino, Sarah Van Borek, Canada’s World.