Walking into the Jack White Building on Camosun College’s Interurban campus, searching for the Camosun Innovates headquarters, I didn’t really know what to expect. When I walked through the glass doors into room 102A, the first thing I noticed was the dull hum of machinery hanging in the air. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, but it was constant. The offices were clean and modern, especially when compared to some of the older buildings at the Lansdowne campus. I was greeted by Camosun Innovates (CI) director Richard Gale and student interaction lead Rich Burman. I was here to try to understand what CI is all about, so they led me through another glass door into a room called the Babcock Interaction Lab, which is where I started putting the pieces of CI together.
Practicality and applied learning
The Babcock Interaction Lab’s flexible workspace is adjacent to the shop where all the machinery is kept, and the hum immediately intensified as we entered. I would later learn that a lot of the noise was coming from their massive 3D printer and the climate control system used to keep it, and the shop, cool. At 18 cubic feet, this is the largest 3D printer on Vancouver Island and was acquired through a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).
On a table next to the wall was a pile of small plastic hydraulic arms that had been used in a demonstration for middle-school students who visited the office as part of an outreach program called Science Rendezvous. Burman told me that it’s common to see things like this lying around their shop because they are always trying to expose students of all ages to science and technology. These science projects, however, paled in comparison with the enormous robotic arm that was around the corner. This one, I was told, was donated to Camosun Innovates by local construction company Morinwood and was actually too big to be used for most of the projects they work on. As it happens, smaller robotic arms, often used for welding, are more practical at Camosun Innovates. And practicality is what Camosun Innovates is all about.
“We tell people that we are a research centre at Camosun,” says Burman. “We are not the only place at Camosun College where applied research happens, but it’s important to us that people understand what applied research is. And for us it involves identifying a challenge that is brought to us by somebody external, or perhaps internal. So, identifying a challenge, identifying needs, and then coming up with a practical solution to their challenge. And that’s the important part, that there is a practical solution at the end of all of our projects. If you look up the definition of ‘innovation,’ you’ll see almost the identical thing. You’re coming up with new ideas and processes to existing problems with a practical solution at the end of it. And it’s really important to us that that’s there and it works. It fits so beautifully with applied learning, which is what we pride ourselves on.”
The challenges of funding
The Technology Access Center (CTAC) is the physical space and all the equipment at Camosun Innovates. Their robotic arms, 3D printer, high-powered water jet, all of it is available for use by other faculties at Camosun if they have a need (mostly, I was told, they work with the Engineering, Computer Science, and Visual Arts departments). Unlike most other departments at Camosun, Camosun Innovates is a cost-recovery unit for the college. This means they have to make enough money to maintain their operations and recover the investment made by the college. Gale admits that this can be challenging at times.
“There are some technology access centres that are in fact operated as not-for-profit organizations and are not associated directly with a college, but we’re funded through an NSERC [National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada] program that is specifically designed to support work that colleges are doing for local business,” says Gale. “So, it’s because of the federal funding that we receive for our Technology Access Center and for our granting. There is a dedicated college program that brings in funding for us. We wouldn’t exist if we weren’t attached to a college because in BC there’s no funding for applied research. The province doesn’t fund applied research in the way that we do it. So, the only way that we can exist is if we can get funding from the federal government and the federal government attaches their funding to either a college or a university. And there are different funding structures depending on whether you’re a college or a university.”
Getting off campus
But being part of the college doesn’t mean that CI works solely for the college. It works with organizations big and small to come up with solutions to problems, be it large international businesses like aerospace, defence, and security company Babcock Canada or locals like Nature Bee, who make wax coverings for containers and jars as an alternative to plastic wrap. But always they’re looking to partner with companies that need new solutions. They aren’t just a manufacturing centre; they are problem solvers.
“The other thing that I want to say, to make sure we are really clear, is that we don’t want to take work away from anyone on the island,” says Gale. “So, if a client comes in and says, ‘We want you to do this,’ if it’s something that they can have readily available in the economy, we send them to where they can have that work done. It’s only work that has a research base that we’re interested in doing. Because we’re innovators and because we’re federally funded, and the last thing we want to do is take work away from the people who are doing work on the outside.”
Gale says one of the hallmarks of CI is that they are most interested in using what’s available to them.
“If we can build an answer to their problem just using stuff off the shelf,” he says, “we will do that before we look for something more complicated and complex and maybe a little more sexy but not quite as practical.”
CI started off with a different focus when it received its initial funding 12 years ago, but that focus on practicality was there. Before they were Camosun Innovates, they were Camosun College’s Sport Innovation Centre. Working closely with the Canadian Sports Institute and other organizations, they developed new technologies for Olympic athletes. Despite being a relatively young organization, Camosun Innovates created the first technology access centre in British Columbia, which was one of the first in Canada. CI’s scope of work has widened over the years, but even today they still do work in sports science with a focus on para-athletes and innovating new technologies to improve their performance. By way of example, Burman shows me a sled from sledge hockey.
“Basically the seat that was made for players was one size—we joke, one size fits nobody—and you pad it out with foam to get it to fit,” he says. “What we did was work with a bunch of members of the Canadian sledge hockey team to come up with a process to create a composite seat that fits their butt exactly, so it was like a well-fitting pair of skates. So, we had five to six players at the last Olympics that were in different versions of technology that was developed here.”
To COVID-19 and beyond
Besides sledge hockey, Camosun Innovates has also worked with athletes in sit ski, para rowing, wheelchair racing, and wheelchair rugby. It’s even built sports simulations for the Richmond Olympic Oval so that visitors can feel what it’s like to sit ski or go white-water kayaking without getting their feet wet. No matter what they are working on, it’s important to CI that it’s something meaningful and that will make a positive difference in the community.
“We did a project with a company that had designed what they call a puzzle house,” says Gale. “It’s a house that’s built entirely out of wood that’s cut on our water jet cutter here and it can be put together entirely with a rubber mallet and zip ties. It’s like an IKEA house, only you can take it apart and put it back together again, so it’s reusable. So, wonderful for migrant housing, wonderful for temporary housing. So, it was not only much more effective and efficient, but we also created a way for them to cut the wood that it’s made out of in a way that reduced waste by 30 percent. So we try to do green things with products that may not necessarily be seen as green and we like to support companies that are supporting the green economy.”
During the pandemic, Camosun Innovates worked with local health authorities to come up with innovative ways of defending against COVID-19. They created specialized vaccine trays so that vaccines could be transported quickly and securely. Because some vaccines are sensitive, it’s important that they aren’t jostled and are kept at a stable temperature during transportation, otherwise they can become denatured and useless. In some cases, they need to be moved from their original boxes to smaller containers in less than three minutes. This was made easy by using a sort of gripping device that could pick up 15 vials at once. Camosun Innovates also engineered a faster way of manufacturing face shields and produced more than 9,000 of them for Island Health to help protect medical professionals who were most at risk of contact with the virus.
“We were designated as an essential service during the pandemic because we continued to support the local economy so, honestly, we were only shut down for a couple of days while we figured out how we were going to keep everything clean and safe,” says Gale. “I’d say the only challenge we really experienced was that a lot of our normal partners had to shut down. And so, if it were not for the work with the health authorities, we probably would have had not enough work to go around. But once the health authorities figured out that we could be of service to them, we had far more work than we knew what to do with.”
The student touch
Because of the pandemic, the organization has had fewer students than usual occupying their student workroom. When I visited, Connor Yutani-Patterson, a student grant worker who came to Camosun Innovates during the pandemic, was one of only a few students working in the lab. Yutani-Patterson is working on a project that aims to digitize Indigenous artist Carey Newman’s room-sized art installation The Witness Blanket for virtual reality so that its message can reach a wider audience.
“I’ve been working on it for about four to five months or so by now,” says Yutani-Patterson. “I’ve been recreating the blanket from a bunch of scan data that we took at the actual installation in a program called Blender. I’ve been doing the retopology to make it videogame friendly because we’re recreating it in Unreal so that you can go around and check it out in the virtual reality space.”
The Witness Blanket contains artifacts and belongings from residential schools that were donated by survivors as well as by churches and the government of Canada. The installation is housed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and each piece has its own history and its own story to tell.
“We wanted to work on this project because it’s a way of getting the ability to see this piece to people who might not have the chance. So, people living in rural communities or especially First Nations people living in more rural communities who wouldn’t have a chance to travel to Toronto or any of these places where the normal art installation travels to, we wanted to create something that they’d be able to check out,” says Yutani-Patterson. “So, VR seemed like the best place to get that ‘like you’re there’ experience without having to go to the place.”
When the project is complete, the viewer will be able to look around and see the installation as if they were there. But they will also be able to interact with the belongings and look at them from different angles that would be impossible at the real installation. Yutani-Patterson also plans to have audio narratives associated with some items so that people can listen to their stories. Camosun Innovates is planning on making the experience, along with VR headsets, available to any Indigenous community that would like one.
“Initially we bought a scanner using Camosun College funds to scan The Witness Blanket, and now we’re working on the digitizing of individual artifacts and the haptics that go along with that,” says Gale. “It had been disassembled for cleaning, so we were able to get to all of the pieces that way. So yeah, we flew to Winnipeg, and we had two students fly with [us], one of whom was Indigenous, to scan all of the artifacts and we were there for just under a week.”
For Yutani-Patterson, working at CI is a chance to learn, as well. He says that his general role at CI is as a programmer but he’s learned so much about other positions.
“I do a bunch of work creating apps for the company and doing all of the things that require simulations or physics and that sort of thing within a physics engine,” he says. “So even being very tangential to the normal shop mechanics and stuff like that I’ve learned a lot about those processes, because I have a need to make apps and interact with them, and my portion of a project that I might be on might be a small portion where I do some calculations or put something together and that requires knowledge of how the other processes work. Like 3D printing, CMS, all sorts of things along those lines. I’ve learned a lot about fields that I never thought I would have any sort of tangent with otherwise just by existing in the shop—you kind of absorb a lot.”
So, I went to try to understand what CI does, and here’s what it does: it uses technology to solve meaningful, complex problems. It supports the local economy and companies that are trying to make positive change. It empowers students to get involved in science and engineering, gives them experience in practical situations, and even provides a pathway for employment.
Sure, Camosun Innovates is a technology access centre, but, as Burman puts it, “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the way you use the technology.”