East York, Ontario, Monday, September 29, 1994: 425 students are trying out the chairs, workstations, and kiosks in a 104,000-square-foot space devoted totally to training content creators for the information highway.
The students look like kids who fell asleep in their own beds and woke up in a candy store--or maybe a video arcade. "They're looking very happy," says Centennial College Dean Walter Stewart. "They're wandering around with dazed expressions. It's clear they didn't realize they were coming to a place like this."
The place in question is the Bell Information Design Centre, a sort of Valhalla disguised as a training facility for communicators. It's also a retreat for corporate trainees, an incubator for ideas, a beta test site, a technology demonstration site, a software development center and, at times, part of a community college campus. The building, which won an architectural award in the 50s, has been totally renovated for its new life. It's amazingly open and bright; there is almost no place unlit by natural light, and even cables and servers are visible behind glass panels. And it is nothing if not technologically enabled.
Of its 261 computers, 100 are Silicon Graphics Indys ("We wanted 300," says Stewart, "but we didn't have the money just yet"). The 12-bit and 24-bit Indys--their claim to fame is dazzling graphics performance on the desktop--are already spinning out animation, video edits, and multimedia packages. At the high end, some are animating or rendering with a suite of high-powered tools from Alias: Animator 5.0, Power Animation 6.0, Designer, Eclipse, and PowerPlay tools. Others are creating full-blown multimedia statements with Silicon Graphics authoring software.
Behind a glass partition, quietly flexing its silicon muscle, is the College's 101st Silicon Graphics machine: an Onyx graphics supercomputer with masses of RAM, multiple 200-MHz processors, and a RealityEngine2 graphics engine. As a file server, it's barely breathing; it will soon get aerobic when the college converts it into a video server.
The Centre gets video from its two TV studios and its digital imaging lab, a two-story studio that replaces the traditional photo lab. "We made a decision not to move chemical photography onto the site," says Stewart. "All photography is digital. The Silicon Graphics stuff will certainly be critical there." For audio, there are three radio studios.
The Centre's hardware talks over its own information superhighway--a 600-drop wideband fiber-optic network designed and installed by Bell Canada, the Centre's prime corporate partner. "We told Bell," says Stewart, "that we'd be gravely disturbed if at any point in the next ten years we were prevented from using a piece of technology because our network wasn't up to it."
This sounds like preoccupation with technology--a dean talking like a latent techie. But Stewart isn't a techie: he's a visionary who's interested in transparency and convergence, and technology is merely the means to those ends. Transparency, in his terms, means not letting technology get in the way of the creation of knowledge.
"We chose Silicon Graphics technology for three reasons," says Stewart. "We were enormously impressed with the technology; we had a strong sense that it was sunrise, not sunset technology; and we found Silicon Graphics a fabulous company to deal with. The technology is exciting because it makes the technical process more transparent so the creative process can flourish."
This is not a campus for technicians or technologists. We're here to train content creators for the information superhighway." Stewart can see the information superhighway filling up with Hollywood reruns, and he is pledged to resist. "This campus," he says, "is a blow against 500 channels of Gilligan's Island."
Stewart's other great concern is convergence--a meeting of minds, interests, and technologies--that sums up the Information Design Centre in a word. Everything and everybody converges here. One obvious example is the Centre's layout. Faculty offices surround student program areas to form clusters. Between the clusters are spaces called nodes. Around the perimeter of each node are half a dozen Indy workstations that are totally unscheduled and available to the students. In the center of the node is a sort of super kiosk with a high-powered Indy, a 35-inch screen, and every imaginable peripheral, including surround sound.
Say you're a student or trainee and you've just completed a graphics animation and saved it on the network. You go to a node, call up your workfile, and ask the people sitting around --students, instructors, staff members, or corporate trainees--for their reactions. That, no doubt, is convergence.
Other kinds of convergence--the building's multiple uses, which are still being invented--make the Centre a good investment. Corporate training will bring in funds to expand the technology and keep it current. Silicon Graphics has designated the Centre a Silicon Studio, which means that everything up to network TV programming can be created here in a totally digital environment.
The Centre's one, two, and three-year courses (and any number of short-term and part-time courses) in journalism, radio and television, corporate communications, book and magazine publishing, and creative advertising have attracted university graduates and people who have left jobs to upgrade their skills. They're all glad to be there. So is Stewart, whose offices are in another, less favored building. He visits the Centre every chance he gets--a form of convergence that is totally transparent to anyone who knows him.
"They can hardly keep me out of here," says Stewart.
