Digital Media Experience Centre
Ryerson's president has a high-stakes digital vision
Sheldon Levy's plans for the Toronto university revolve around the yet-to-be built and funded Digital Media Experience Centre. Is he a visionary or overly ambitious?
PETER CHENEY
Globe and Mail
March 16, 2009
TORONTO — At the moment, Sheldon Levy's digital empire is in what might be called the conceptual phase: He sees a glass-walled building rising above Yonge Street, filled with glowing computer screens and smart people creating the Next Big Thing.
Who knows what that might be: The next Google? Software that helps cure cancer? Personal robot valets?
That will come later. For now, Prof. Levy's empire consists of a muddy demolition site at the corner of Yonge and Gould, with neighbours that run to the tattoo and pornography end of the retail spectrum.
But Prof. Levy, the ambitious president of Ryerson University, is not deterred. He looks at the seedy strip with the brand of optimism and vision that the developers of Las Vegas once brought to the empty sands of Nevada. "Just think about what could be here!" he enthuses.
He pulls out an architectural rendering that has erased the grim façades and replaced them with his vision: a silvery glass building that will lead Ryerson and the city surrounding it into a new digital future.
It cost $27-million to buy the land alone (including the iconic Sam the Record Man building) but that's just the beginning. Prof. Levy's plans for Ryerson include a vast makeover that will raise the student population by more than 25 per cent, and cost at least $150-million.
Central to the plan is the Digital Media Experience Centre, a project aimed at making Toronto a world capital of digital technology. "If you're not best-in-class, you're a branch plant," he says.
"We have all the elements here," he says. "Why can't we be the best in the world?"
The province has already committed $45-million. Where the rest of the funding will come from remains to be seen, but Prof. Levy has worked hard to soften the ground. On March 5, he spoke to the Empire Club. Three days later, he was on the podium at the Canadian Club of Toronto, delivering much the same sales pitch: Ryerson's makeover and the digital-media project, or DMXC, as it is sometimes called, will lift not just the university, but the city itself. "I am offering economic opportunity," he told the crowd. "And a chance to do something great."
Prof. Levy has won his share of converts in the academic world. Among them is Ken Coates, dean of arts at the University of Waterloo. "This is the way forward," Prof. Coates says. "It's an excellent idea."
The University of Toronto will also be involved in the digital play, offering resource-sharing. President David Naylor says, "U of T has the largest group of professors working in the digital-media field in Canada. ... And we see major advantages to collaborating with other universities such as Ryerson and Waterloo in building our collective capacity to compete and win, be it in attracting the best students or fostering the most successful innovations."
But not everyone is convinced. Some wonder if Prof. Levy's plans for the university are too ambitious, given the economic climate. "The whole world's going broke, and we're asking for all this money," said one student. "I don't know if it's going to fly or not."
Students compared Prof. Levy's grand schemes to a high-stakes thrill ride - and some wondered if they would end up wrapped around a telephone pole. "It's good that some big ideas are happening," says Michelle Cinelli, a fourth-year journalism student who works as the arts and features editor of RyersOnline. "But we're afraid that it could spiral downward. He's trying some major stuff. I guess we all wonder if he's going to [expletive] up hardcore."
If it comes to pass, Ms. Cinelli believes the digital-media project will act as a great leveller. Ryerson has always played something of an academic underdog role to the storied University of Toronto. The difference between the schools is symbolized by U of T's famous Robarts library, or "Fort Book."
In Ms. Cinelli's view, the digital-media project could erase the inequality, since electronic information doesn't depend on printed books and the ivied buildings that store them: In theory, a digitized Ryerson could port the contents of Fort Book (not to mention Harvard and Oxford) onto its glowing screens. And so Ms. Cinelli waits to see whether the digital future will arrive. "Right now, our library is a joke compared to theirs," she says. "But this would change everything."
Another key selling point for the project is the revitalization of the Yonge Street strip. Although the section of Yonge below Dundas has been largely gentrified, the area north of Gould remains a seedy carnival. There's a sticky-floored porn theatre, a fake-ID merchant, and one of the city's grimmest payday-loan operations, the cashier ensconced behind finger-marked bulletproof glass. The strip-joint customer is also well served: There is Remington's ("Men of Steel!") and of course the Zanzibar, Yonge Street's sleazy flagship: "75 hot table dancers, no cover, no minimum..."
If Prof. Levy gets his way, this will be pushed aside by a high-tech corridor, with Ryerson at its centre. His ideal is the New York City Apple retail store, a glass-enclosed emporium that never closes. "That's the kind of thing you want to see," he says. "Why do we accept crap?"
The concept of the Ryerson digital-media centre can be traced back to the mid-1990s, the Pleistocene era of the Internet age, when Prof. Levy began to realize that digital information would transform the world even more dramatically than the Gutenberg press once had. Since then, he has watched the technology's power for disruptive change, altering everything from medicine to media to manufacturing.
Prof. Levy sees the project as a way to push Toronto into a future that will be defined by technology, noting the decline of the North American auto industry as part of a global trend that is shifting manufacturing jobs toward countries with lower labour costs.
"What do you replace cheap labour with?" he asks. "You replace it with imagination."
Ryerson faculty and alumni are already showing some of the directions that the digital-media project could take. Ling Guan, head of Ryerson's Multimedia Research Laboratory, is, for example, working on technology that allows digital images to be searched for visual content instead of relying on keywords. Prof. Guan is also researching medical applications, including technology that chooses knee implants through digital analysis of a patient's gait.
One former student has developed technology that allows consumers to find the goods they want through handheld devices that scan the area around them for bar codes, then guiding them to the nearest store - or the one with the lowest price. The student is also working on a technology that would allow people to create profiles of potential mates, and sends an alert when someone who meets their parameters comes within a given range.
In his speech at the Empire Club, Prof. Levy said the DMXC would serve as a reef, creating an environment that would foster life around it.
"Our strategy will focus on attracting the strongest researchers and innovators at our universities and others, in Ontario, Canada and internationally," he said. "Our goal is to devise made-in-Toronto solutions for i-banking, i-news, i-business, i-industry, i-medicine, and i-everything."
Although the specifics are still up in the air, Prof. Coates of Waterloo sees the digital-media project as a way of leveraging the assets of several Ontario universities, including his own. (Waterloo is helping with the planning of the project, and will bring its expertise in computer science to the digital-media centre when it's up and running.)
"Who knows where it could go?" he says. "It's our imagination that limits us, not the technology. Digital media is going to transform every sector of society. It's really the students that are driving this, not us. These are the children of Facebook and Twitter."
Prof. Levy's sales effort will continue. "It's a lot of work to make something like this happen," he says. "You've got to make people gamble on your crystal ball."
