Greg Van Alstyne  www.greg.vanalstyne.com
home about selected projects experience and education publication and presentation awards and media contact

work
experience

Ontario College of Art & Design

Strategic
Innovation Lab

Institute without Boundaries (IwB)

Icon Nicholson
New York

The Museum
of Modern Art

freelance
work

Greg Van
Alstyne Design



education
and training

education+
training

travel
experience

Work Experience

Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), Toronto

Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
2005–present

Delivering full-time instruction and design research at Canada’s largest art and design university. Courses include Experience Design, Interactive Communications, Typeface Design, and Think Tank, an interdisciplinary program focused on design and social responsibility.


Director of Research, Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab)
2008–present

Responsible for developing, managing and implementing the research program at Ontario College of Art & Design’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), a research centre for design, innovation and strategic foresight.

Co-organized more than a dozen public events with local and international speakers including Intel Corporation's Lead Human Factors Engineer, Delia Grenville; Catalan media scholar Dr. Carlos Scolari; and New York artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Currently developing foresight– and innovation–based research projects including “sBook: The Future of Reading, Writing and Publishing in the Age of Transmedia” and “2020 Media Futures: Strategic Foresight for Ontario’s Cultural Media Industries.”


Senior Research Associate, Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity
2005–2007

Research included two papers on design and emergence in collaboration with Dr. Robert Logan, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Toronto.


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Bruce Mau Design Inc., Toronto

Director, Institute without Boundaries (IwB)
2002–2005

Mentored and directed student teams in this unique, one-year post professional program in interdisciplinary design, originally a joint project of Bruce Mau Design and George Brown – Toronto City College.

Guided the curation, design and production of Massive Change, the inaugural project of the IwB, in close collaboration with Bruce Mau, IwB student teams, and client/partners.

Art directed and collaboratively produced an array of outcomes including a 20,000 square-foot exhibition commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, a book published by Phaidon Press, exhibition audio guide, national marketing campaign, poster series for the Venice Biennale, series of public events, line of product with Umbra, and an evolving Web site.

Massive Change generated praise from citizen groups, educators, and other diverse audiences. Vancouver showing broke attendance records and received acclaim from mainstream and professional media including CBC, NPR, The Globe and Mail, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, I.D. Magazine, and Dwell.


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Icon Nicholson, New York

Creative Director
1999–2002

Creative lead for the company's largest user experience group, responsible for planning, presenting and designing creative concepts, art direction for large-scale Web sites and other interactive projects.

Pitched and won the project to design and build technology systems for Prada's Manhattan store, part of a US $40m budget. In collaboration with Rem Koolhaas/OMA-AMO, oversaw design and graphic production for the Prada store's multiple user experiences: on-demand video on plasma displays, closet touch screens synced to live inventory, wireless handhelds, staff intranet, and a personalized Web site for VIP clientele.

Directed creation and documentation of extensive design systems for B2C and B2B clients.


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The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Design Manager, New Media
1997–1999

After spearheading the launch of MoMA’s Web presence in 1996, founded the Department of New Media. Supervised nascent new media program including interactive kiosks and online artist projects.

Co-produced and art directed unprecedented projects including the MoMA/MIT Media Lab interactive environments in The Un-Private House, acclaimed educational site Art Safari, and MoMA’s first Online Store.

Trained and managed five producers, along with in-house designers and multiple outside agencies.

Conceived, designed and co-produced MoMA2000 kiosk system, incorporating in-depth, database-driven material for large-scale millennium exhibition series.

Oversaw creation of thousands of pages of Web, kiosk and e-mail content, serving more than two million online visitors annually. Produced and art directed dozens of exhibition subsites and commissioned artist projects, including The Museum as Muse and Achille Castiglioni: Design!

Senior Graphic Designer
1995–1997

Designed and managed multifaceted projects including book design, exhibition graphics, and collateral for major exhibitions such as Light Construction and Pictures of the Times: A Century of Photography from The New York Times. Created and coordinated award-winning exhibition graphics, marketing and collateral for shows including Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, and Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design.


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Freelance work

New York City and Toronto
In collaboration with Kathleen Oginski

1995–2001

Created series design for Grey Room, quarterly journal on art, architecture, media and politics, published by The MIT Press. Designed books for Whitney Museum of American Art, Little, Brown and Co., and Rizzoli International. Art direction for HarperCollins Publishers' corporate Web site, with OVEN Digital, Inc.


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Greg Van Alstyne Design, Toronto

Owner/operator of freelance design studio with one associate
1993–1995

Designed identities, fonts, film titles, publications, and packaging for clients including Art Gallery of Ontario, National Film Board of Canada, Atom Egoyan.


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Bruce Mau Design Inc., Toronto

Senior Design Associate
1987–1993

Designed identities, publications, and marketing material for projects including: S,M,L,XL (Rem Koolhaas/OMA); Zone 6: Incorporations, The Society of the Spectacle, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (Zone Books); Disney Hall identity (Frank Gehry); The Andy Warhol Museum identity.


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Education

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Master of Science in Integrated Digital Media
2009

Thesis: "On the Role of Digital Media in Striving for Sustainability, or How to Achieve Metabolo by Composing the Pluriverse."

University of Toronto

Honors Bachelor of Arts with Distinction
1987

Self-designed program with courses in studio art, art history, architecture, computer graphics, cinema, aesthetics, and semiotics.


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Travel Experience

Travel experience includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Peru, Ecuador and Galapagos Islands, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Austria, Netherlands, England, Denmark, Mexico, United States, and Canada.


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