Through the Interface

Last Monday I left my son in Baltimore and headed back to Dulles for a short flight to Toronto to attend internal meetings with our research team.

I didn't feel like fighting public transport for 3+ hours to get from Baltimore to Dulles, so took the easy (and much more relaxing) path of taking an Uber. I was there in less than 90 minutes - a not insignificant time saving. I really wish it was more convenient to take public transport here.

The flight to Pearson was short - a little over an hour in the air - and as ever I took the UP! Express into downtown Toronto.

For this trip the various out-of-town visitors stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, which was very well situated for the office and the downtown area.

I headed into the office for the end of the day, so I could catch up with a few folks before meeting some former colleagues for dinner.

I have talked about the Generative Design of the Toronto office so many times, over the years, and I still find it a fantastic space to visit.

And it's evolving: the facilities team is continually rethinking the space as our workplace needs shift.

I work a lot with both Josh and Tomas, so seeing them in person is always a good thing.

We have an intern, Theoni, running a neuroscience study.

I knew I wouldn't have time to complete the study - and am ineligible, in any case, as I'm not a Toronto-based employee - but I did want to see what it was all about.

Theoni ran me through the pre-study survey and hooked me up to the wireless EEG headset. Apparently I have an ideal haircut to participate in this kind of study!

On Tuesday we kicked off our internal meetings with a Pub Quiz summarizing some of our recent research efforts. I will say ChatGPT is a brilliant tool for creating fun quiz questions.

I was really happy with the results: everyone scored over 50% but no-one got every single question right. The sign of a well-crafted quiz, in my not-so-humble opinion.

We tried to avoid being shut away in meeting rooms during the course of the week, but as we did need to connect to Zoom from time-to-time we couldn't avoid them completely.

On the Tuesday evening we headed across to the Paint Cabin (note the "t", please) for a tote bag printing activity.

At this point I should probably point out that yes, I knew there were two Paint Cabins in Toronto, on opposite sides of the downtown area. I even knew that we needed to head to the one that was west of downtown. What I didn't know was the name of the street the one we wanted to visit was on, so when someone asked "are we going to the one on Gerrard Street?" I probably - distracted as I was by trying to get the darn Uber app to accept my credit card details when there was an expired version already in the payment methods - said "yes". And I then failed to double-check that Gerrard Street was to the west until we basically arrived there. So we all (and it wasn't just one car-full) had to turn around and fight rush-hour traffic to get to the correct Paint Cabin on Dufferin Street. The silver lining was that during the hour in the car I saw far more of Toronto than I ever had, and we then only arrived 35 minutes late for the tote bag printing.

It all worked out, in the end: the Paint Cabin folks were lovely, offering to extend our session should we need to (we didn't, in the end).

The activity was a huge amount of fun. We used lino printing techniques to create our own custom-printed tote bags, starting by drawing onto a rubber block and then carving out the reverse of the image we wanted to print.

We have some genuine artists in the team, but it was an activity that the less artistic of us (ahem, yes that's me) could also engage with.

It was so much fun!

The Paint Cabin team gave really helpful guidance to those of us who needed it.

Some of us chose really elaborate designs, whether due to the intricacy of the detail or the choice of alternating between positive and negative space (this is really hard!).

Rhys was one of the first to finish on our table.

His test print came out well, so he quickly proceeded on to the tote bag printing.

Here he is comparing his finished bag with the photo he used for inspiration.

It came out really well! I like that Rhys went with an architectural design, which is very much on-theme for this team. There was also an additional layer of difficulty to work directly from a photo.

I, on the other hand, went with a stylized picture of my dog. I used this picture from the web, which a) looked like my puppy and b) wasn't very complicated.

I'm really not good at drawing - even copying an existing drawing - so my dog ended up looking a bit gaunt. Oh well.

Once carved out the print came out well, though! Here's the print block once it had been used.

And the tote bag, waiting to dry.

While I clearly missed my own dog, local puppy love could be purchased with accidentally dropped bits of pizza.

After a successful team building, we walked to Liberty Village for dinner at Nodo with a special guest, David Kirsh.

We'd invited David - who is a professor at UCSD and the outgoing president of ANFA - to come to Toronto to talk to us about recent work he has published.

The following morning David gave his talk which covered a wide range of fascinating topics at the intersection of Architecture and Neuroscience.

We held more planning sessions through the rest of the day.

It was very intense - as is usual of these meetings - but really important for our work.

You can't leave Tomas alone with a whiteboard and not expect to see scenes like this.Many thanks to Frederik, Bon, Tomas, Jacky, Dagmara, Jeremy, Rhys, Ray, Yi, Dale, Pru, Jamie and Nastaran (the last two are not pictured here) for such a great few days. Dagmara did an amazing job crafting an effective agenda and Charlie provided invaluable logistical support from back in the UK (with lots of local help from Camilla).

By the time I left for the airport on Thursday afternoon I was really starting to feel under the weather.

Pearson was a hot mess - how can they have long-haul flights departing at the same time from adjacent gates with inadequate queuing space? - but I eventually boarded.

I thought I'd manage to sleep on the flight, but ended up across the aisle from a young couple with a baby (which is usually adorable) and who started out speaking really loudly to each other while people were trying to sleep and then promptly managed to fall deeply asleep while their baby screamed. I would have picked it up and walked it around the cabin to soothe it, but then they'd have woken up and shouted at me. Ah well.

I got home bleary-eyed at Friday lunchtime and curled into bed, where I stayed for a long time. (I actually had to get up and function during the weekend, as the kids had things going on, but I was wiped out come Monday morning and had to take the day off.)

At least I'm now reunited with Daisy, who was very glad to see me despite not seeming to care all that much for her new tote bag.