Te be held in the Small Hall or Ian Gulland lecture theatre

For the most part, my job has to do with ideas their generation, refinement, communication, and realization. It has taken me from the design of musical instruments, to film making, through bicycle design, to strategic planning, while touching on several points in between. There are a few questions that consistently seem to follow me in these travels. These include, Where do these ideas come from? Can creativity be taught?, and if so, "How."

On the one hand, none of these questions are new. And by the same token, the sanity or credibility of anyone who claimed to have a general answer two them would have to be questioned. But on the other hand, I have asked these questions of myself, and in many ways, how I design my life, career, ways of working and ways of thinking are largely based on my own answers to them.

My experience is that much of these answers apply more broadly than just to me. Hence, here I will share them. This, of course, is only as it should. Why? Because one of my strongest conclusions despite living in a world that celebrates the cult of the individual is that even ideas that come to us as individuals are the consequence of interactions with others. To the extent that I might be considered smart or creative, it is not because I thus as an individual, but rather that I have smart and creative friends who share ideas with me, stimulate me, and set the bar at an appropriate height. Yes, I chose my parents well, and have worked hard. But that just provided the tools that equipped me to play with my friends, to be worthy of playing on the team. It is not, in itself, the source.

To master all of which needs to be mastered to address most of the serious problems today is beyond the capacity of any individual. The days of the Renaissance man or woman are long over. But what gives me hope is the thought that the era of the Renaissance team is just starting to reach its stride. And these are the thoughts that I want to explore with you in this talk.

Bill Buxton is a leading interaction designer and researcher. He is Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. Bill is one of the pioneers in computer music, and has played an important role in the development of computer-based tools for film, industrial design, graphics and animation. As a researcher, he has had a long history with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Toronto (where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute). During the fall of 2004, he was a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and during the Spring of 2005, he is a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 2001, the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002 Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada, and he was elected to the ACM's CHI Academy.