In May of 2019, a team led by the University of Saskatchewan Kenderdine Art Gallery received a Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund grant to develop a digital service with Saskatchewan arts organizations to allow them to engage with and give voice to their audiences and other art creators. However, the exact deliverable was intentionally vague; rather than presupposing what this diverse group (from internationally recognized art galleries to community puppet theatres) needs, the grant was built around first engaging with both these organizations and their current and potential audiences in order to gain an understanding of their varied needs. Only once this assessment was done would the actual development begin. In this paper we will introduce the project, and the funding program that supported it, and describe the process of community consultation for both the development of the grant application and the needs assessment. We will introduce the findings from the first phase of the Shared Spaces project and the resulting first prototypes for arts engagement, which use augmented reality, that have gone back out to the communities for further consultation and refinement.

Designing for the Internet can be a wonderfully enlivening experience for the graphic designer. But it can be an equally frustrating experience for typographers, as their control over typeface, word spacing, justification, and the other myriad details that define a well-crafted printed page is reduced to the most rudimentary choices. This article will examine this apparent disjuncture by first briefly outlining the historical separation between the trades of graphic designer and typographer and then discussing some of the advantages of having the designers of electronic interfaces become familiar with book typography traditions and of having electronic reading interfaces support basic typographic practices.

Different readers approach a text in different ways and for different reasons, so designers of interfaces for electronic reading and scholarship must strive for flexibility. Eric Gill’s illustrations for the Golden Cockerel Press invite exploration into the social function of erotic texts, public versus private reading, fine book-making practices, and more, and we hope to provide the tools to allow scholars to engage with these texts in their multiplicity. There may also be readers who just want to read the texts and look at the pictures, and we need to make sure we do not ignore their needs. Most importantly, there are, or will be, readers who want to interact with the texts in ways that we cannot imagine, and we need to do all we can to make this experimentation possible.

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In this paper I discuss the adoption of artistic research creation methodologies, the creation and exhibition of artistic works closely aligned with scholarly research, as a way to increase public engagement with academic research. I begin by discussing the need for scholars to consider the 'public first' when developing research communication plans, and draw upon the emergence of 'mobile first' interface design as a metaphor. With mobile first development, also known as progressive enhancement, 'You start by establishing a basic level of user experience that all browsers will be able to provide when rendering your web site,' but you also build in more advanced functionality that will automatically be available to devices, such as desktop computers (W3C 2015). I argue that we need to prioritize public first research outputs if we are truly serious about engaging the public in our research. I then move into a discussion of various research creation methodologies and explain how they are similar to, and differ from, critical making, another emergent humanities research practice that is based upon the making of physical objects. Finally I provide examples of successful research creation activities, including some related to my current SSHRC-funded project, The Post-Digital Book Arts.