Jamie Kwan
Education
Bachelor of Architectural Science, Toronto Metropolitan University
Email Address
Specialization
Design Thinking, Interaction Design
Biography
Jamie is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary designer. He was trained in Architecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, where his studies focused on sustainable design, urbanism, and the design process. Since then, he has collaborated with architects, planners, interior designers, graphic designers, musicians, educators, community activists, biomedical engineers, and melittologists (bee scientists) on a wide-range of projects and installations. His experience working at Sustainable.TO Architecture + Building—a small design firm in Toronto’s east end—sparked an interest in community engagement within the context of sustainability.
Jamie’s academic and professional work has been featured at Nuit Blanche, Urbanspace Gallery, and in the Paul Cocker Architecture Gallery, as well as on major media outlets such as CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail, and Designlines Magazine. Find him on Twitter @jamiemkwan.
Why Digital Media?
As someone who studied architecture—arguably the most public of the arts—Jamie is naturally interested in the human aspect of design, and the way that human interaction manifests itself in the physical world. Today, digital media is everywhere; with the rise of social media, wearable computing, and augmented and virtual reality, digital media is changing the way people interact on a daily basis. Through the MDM program, Jamie hopes to explore the relationship between physical and digital spaces, and gain the skills to better understand how to design for a human-centric digital landscape: an architecture evolving to these new digital interactions.
Research
Major Research Project: "Feeling Culture & Glass Divides: Museums in a Digital Age"
Exploration of how tangible embodied interactions embedded in museums can lead to more impactful engagements between visitors and artifacts/specimens on display. More specifically, this MRP will re-formulate how cultural artifacts are displayed in galleries through hybridized physical/digital co-design, in order to re-connect the artifact to the phenomenological aspects of the culture, and ultimately its underlying historic narrative.