Brock Dishart

Inspired by the course lectures, I find ways to generate discussion by exposing students to a wide variety of artistic and practical work to shape their understanding of what it means to be interdisciplinary. I strive to create a learning atmosphere that is open-minded, inclusive, honest, and kind. I also integrate notions of disability justice into the classroom in an effort to expand horizons on what is possible and to make space for the reality of our lives outside of the classroom.

Conducting research with older adults on how to create more third spaces made for and run by community members in order to reduce social isolation and improve mental well-being for older adults in Canada. We connect with community members through the Art Hive model, which encourages autonomy, connection, and a non-judgmental approach to research through creative arts & technology. We are located in a small lab in an unused commercial space in a local mall in the Côte-St-Luc neighbourhood, west of Montréal. Through this project, I am also working on intake for studies on anxiety, depression and creative arts therapy, writing literature reviews, creating an open-source repository, and conducting online, in-person, and hybrid qualitative research involving techniques from art, drama, and music in 1:1 interviews and group sessions.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, TFO found itself in a unique position where parents and teachers relied on TFO's educational content for teaching kids at home. I was brought on for a special project to help reorganize and restrategize editorial content on the website, as well as give guidance on UX strategies for a new homepage, menu navigation, accessibility functionality, and the use of new brand guidelines on the website. I advocated for interviews, surveys, and usability testing in the discovery and development phase of the new website to ensure a product that was useful and easy-to-use.

Machine Gum was a Francophone production company located in Toronto. Here, I worked on improving the companies online brand visibility by improving their SEO, website, YouTube strategy, and updating IMDb and Wiki pages with new information. I also worked on managing social media for the Canadian Francophone (outside of Quebec) music TV show, Balade.

An app designed to support mental health, identity, and well-being in youth by addressing cultural, social and systemic taboos. We were the first group accepted into the Toronto Metropolitan-MIT lab focused on entrepreneurship and machine learning. I researched how to encourage empathy in online interactions, how to create engagement with youth, and how to effectively implement a mood-tracking tool to assist youth in monitoring their own mental health as well as in assessing the need for intervention (connecting them to local support lines). Sample project: Our team worked with teens in a Toronto high school with the objective of learning what keeps teenagers engaged in using their favourite apps. This project required sensitivity to the adolescent mindset. We planned exercises in small groups and an activity where they wrote down topics that they felt uncomfortable talking about with others. We also explored how sharing our own vulnerable stories would in turn open them up to share their stories with us. We wore plain clothes that matched their tone and style to help minimize power dynamics and reduce stress.

For three years, I worked as Digital Producer for an Indie music TV show for the francophone TV station TFO in downtown Toronto. In an exciting and fast-paced environment, I was in charge of the show’s digital production through its websites, social media, and app. I ensured the vision of the production was maintained as well as innovating new ways for fans to interact with the show. This required working different teams, attention to detail, being highly organized and working well under pressure. During my time here, I took courses in UX design and applied my learnings to the app and website I developed for the series. In September 2017, I won a Gemini Award for the creation of the BRBR music app.

This was an exciting opportunity to build a social brand for the indie music TV show BRBR. Over one year, I focused on implementing and testing new social media strategies which resulted in our Youtube channel surpassing 1 million views within a year and increasing our Facebook page likes by over 150% in the same time. I managed a team of bloggers and created and maintained an editorial calendar.

My academic work focuses on the embodiment of emotion with the use of tangible technology, embodied interaction design, and mental health in the queer community. My PhD research will work with the queer community to explore embodied ways of interacting with technology that helps facilitate emotion regulation and processing through the body with a focus on queer ways of knowing, post-traumatic growth, resilience and queer joy.

MRP: Incloo is a dating app built from inclusive design research methodologies. This multi-method qualitative research study recruited dating app users 18 - 19 who identified as a person of colour, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming to participate in the design process of a new, inclusive dating app for everyone!