Spark

Separation and divorce are common in Canada. But splitting up is never an easy thing.

Now, though, new online services and tech tools aim to make the process easier. They range from online mediation, to apps that help with co-parenting. The overarching goal is to keep the process of splitting up and co-parenting *out* of the court system. To simplify and demystify the whole process.

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich is a lawyer and is affiliated with Carleton University. She recently concluded a study examining how technology generally and apps such as OurFamilyWizard are changing the way separated and divorced parents co-parent.

Chris Bentley, the former Attorney General of Ontario, is the managing director of the Legal Innovation Zone at Ryerson University, which helps improve access to the legal system and provides free online resources to separating and divorcing couples.

Jenny Friedland is a lawyer and mediator in Toronto, who helps couples "exhaust the hate" and try to separate without resorting to litigation.

This episode originally aired January 19, 2020.

For two years, two months, and two days, Henry David Thoreau lived alone, in a tiny cabin he built on the edge of Walden Pond. Shortly after, in 1854, he published Walden.

This week Spark revisits Walden, and looks at its elegant relevance for today's world. Michael Harris calls Walden a "swan song for an antique enjoyment of time alone." He's the author of The End of Absence and Solitude. He discusses how we can find solitude in today's world and why we need it.

An installation at the Daniels School of Architecture at the U of T. called New Circadia: Adventures in Mental Spelunking was a giant, gently-lit and sound-muffled cave where visitors can relax and leave their devices behind.

And 10 years ago, filmmaker and internet pioneer Tiffany Shlain and her family decided to do what many have tried before them: a digital detox. And they've been avoiding digital devices for one day ever since, even as her children have grown up. We talk about unplugging and her new book, 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week.

This episode originally aired December 8, 2019.

Failure. It's romanticized in tech startup culture, but what does it actually have to teach us? Corporate culture has certainly shifted a long way from the days of "failure is not an option." Farhan Thawar is the VP of engineering at Shopify. He says it's not so much failure but a willingness to look stupid that really counts.

Juliana Castro thinks we need to renegotiate our relationship with failure. She's come up with some tactics to embrace our mistakes without romanticizing failure.

Melanie Stefan, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, believes we all need a CV of Failures. She explains how a failure resume can be part of our success story.

This episode originally aired December 1st, 2019.

A stair-climbing wheelchair might seem like a cool innovation. But for Liz Jackson, it's another example of what she calls a "disability dongle," a well-intended, but ultimately useless solution to a problem people disabled people never knew they had. Liz Jackson is a disability advocate, design strategist, and the founder of The Disabled List. She says people with disabilities need to be on the front lines of innovation and not just the recipients of design.

Accessibility for people with disabilities didn't just happen. Its history includes do-it-yourself ingenuity, activism, and shifts in how we think about the politics of design. Bess Williamson explores this evolution in her book Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design.

Empathy is considered to be good quality for designers thinking about truly inclusive design. But User Experience designer Amelia Abreu believes the trend of "trying on" a disability to build empathy into accessible design actually exclude disabled people from the design process.

This episode originally aired November 10, 2019.

This week on Spark, how algorithms and digital technologies try to predict, or even influence, our behaviour on scales both large and small. Amazon, Google and Facebook all have an image of us.

John Cheney-Lippold suggests that doesn't truly reflect how we are in real life and that the profiles that algorithms build of us reflect how companies want to see us, in ways that give value to them. And Abeba Birhane suggests that the —"I think, therefore I am" notion of the self — isn't the only way to view the individual.

This episode originally aired on November 3, 2019.

Has technology altered the way we remember things? What does knowledge mean when we use our phones to store facts instead of our brain? Evan Risko, a psychologist and the Canada Research Chair in Embodied and Embedded Cognition at the University of Waterloo, digs into these questions.

Henning Beck's latest book, Scatterbrain, argues that our brains aren't anything like computers. Instead our brains are constantly dumping and rearranging information. The neuroscience of memory in the digital age.

And how does the internet change the way we know and share information? Kenyatta Cheese, (ken-YATT-ah) co-creator of Know Your Meme, explores memes as images densely packed with meaning.

This episode originally aired October 27, 2019.

We rely on complex, global technological systems for our economy and society. But those systems are often hidden from us. This week, a look at two hidden systems we rely on every day.

Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine, takes us inside the complex world of weather forecasting. And then we do a deep, deep dive to the bottom of the ocean, where Nicole Starosielski, the author of The Undersea Network, explains the dizzying array of undersea cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

This episode originally aired September 15, 2019.

Innovation, in its purest form, comes from unfettered imagination. The simple decision to try. To be flexible. To think outside the box.

But there will always be someone who says that the box is "just how it's always been."

And so most of the time, we stick with the status quo. Change, after all, is tough.

But then came COVID-19, and world protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality.

Suddenly all of the reasons why certain processes, systems, and operations couldn't be flexible evaporated.

The idea of going "back to normal" is now off the table. We saw that most office workers could work from home, or with staggered hours.

We saw that cities could open up streets for pedestrians and bicycles.

We've seen what's possible. In all aspects of our social, economic and political lives, people are advocating for a NEW "new normal". This week: how we design a more flexible future together.

+ Michael Longfield, the interim Executive Director of Cycle Toronto, on how the city has built kilometres of new bike lanes, created car-free zones, and what might be needed to ensure they stay in place after the pandemic threat subsides.

+ The pandemic rapidly switched education to an emergency, remote-teaching model. But does that temporary change mark a bigger shift towards online learning? And could that make university and college a more flexible experience? Tony Bates, the author of a dozen books on online learning and distance education, weighs in on how higher education is changing.

New technologies aren't neutral. They're designed by us, and they can be an expression of our values... and our biases. That doesn't necessarily mean a technologist or a tech company consciously sets out to skew technology in a particular way. But the questions we ask, or don't, about a new technology shape how it can be used. So this time: questions. About technology, power, protest, and democracy.

+ The now-cancelled Sidewalk Labs project aimed to create the most measurable community in the world. But would that have turned into a form of high tech surveillance embedded in the built environment? Richard Lachman, the director of Zone Learning and the Experiential Media Institute at Ryerson University, believes the project helped reveal some needed repairs to our privacy and data protections.

+ Technology is often claimed to be neutral. Sure, it can be used for good or ill, but the technology itself doesn't have politics. Not so, argues Ruha Benjamin in Race After Technology. Discriminatory design can perpetuate inequality, reinforcing systemic racism, all while under a cloak of neutrality or even progressivism. In this conversation she discusses the current climate of surveillance and how race itself is used as a kind of technology.

Do you "trust the experts"? Or rather, in what circumstances do you trust the experts?

In a complex world like ours, expertise is important, but specialization and hyper-focus can also get in the way of seeing the big picture.

On the other hand, in rapidly evolving situations where the stakes are high and information is thin on the ground, measured expertise can easily be trumped by rumour and misinformation.

+ Among the challenges facing the world today is an "unprecedented crisis in public understanding," says sociologist Fuyuki Kurasawa. The Director of York University's Global Digital Citizenship Lab says there's an understandable delay between the public's need for knowledge and the response of experts, who are often cautious and concerned that they offer correct information. Into that gap slides social media, where rumors, innuendo, untruth and disinformation run rampant. So how do we address this?

+ We live in an era of extreme specialization, and have come to rely on human experts, protocols, and technology to help us navigate our complex world. In his book, Think for Yourself, author Vikram Mansharamani argues that while consulting expertise is essential, mindlessly following narrow specialization blinds us to the big picture.