Leonardo: Great Northern Way Campus and TRIUMF

Today the Leonardo Summer Institute visited Bruce Clayman, President at the Great Northern Way Campus. It's a budding collaborative campus between four institutions: SFU, UBC, BCIT, and ECIAD. Really ambitious! It was a great opportunity for our group to see exactly what was going on, and where Bruce saw the campus going. In addition to its concentration on sustainability issues, local companies like Electronic Arts have an interest in the campus, which will be sort of a training ground for those who want to work in arts, culture, and digital media. We also had an intimate Q&A session with him about public funding and got his perspectives on many issues to do with academia and funding agencies. Really interesting for grad students, who are trying to navigate these waters.
The GNWC will also be hosting the World Urban Festival, which will occur concurrently with the World Urban Forum in Vancouver next week. There will be shuttle busses going back and forth between the Trade and Convention Centre and this campus. In their "black box studio" which used to be a FINNING welding shop, they have erected a giant structure modeled after the living structures of the Yanomamo... where performances will occur!
After lunch, we travelled west to TRIUMF near UBC, which is again a collaborative venture (built in the 70s) and we got a talk about technology transfer (the process of invention to patents), and got a tour of the facility.
Vancouver is the happening place to be.