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TSW* S1E2 - Josh Tsui - DePaul University
36 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of The TSW* Podcast, host Jay Margalus interviews Josh Tsui, a veteran of the video game industry and current Director of Innovation at DePaul University's Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media.Josh shares his unique career journey spanning over two decades in game development, working on iconic franchises like Mortal Kombat and Tony Hawk at companies including Midway Games and EA. He discusses his recent work on large-scale immersive experiences, and importantly, what he's up to as the Director of Innovation at DePaul University. Key topics include:
- How to create differentiation when developing a community innovation space
- Transitioning from industry to academia, and the processes you need to change and adopt in doing so
- How to choose the right equipment to spark creativity and ideas
- How to scale up a new program and space from the ground floor
Josh also looks ahead to emerging trends in academia and shares insights on the blending edge tech to adopt. This episode offers valuable perspective for anyone interested in getting an innovation center up and running from the ground up..
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
margalus
So it's all artificial intelligence, which you got me into. You convinced me to use some years ago. Okay. So we've got Josh Sway here. Josh is, thank you so much, by the way, for doing this. This is way below your station, but Josh has a wonderful background and I'm sure he can tell you a lot more about it, starting with Midway.
00:00:14
Joshua Tsui
Oh, give me a break. Give me a break.
00:00:22
margalus
And there are probably a lot of great stories there, moving on to EA. Josh ran the video game company a number of years that made the Tony Hawk video games, Romoto, then moved into the experiential gaming space and created a documentary about Midway Games. And now Josh is at DePaul University, where I came from.
Purpose of the Jarvis Innovation Center
00:00:44
margalus
And Josh is running the Jarvis Innovation Center. That's what it is. It's an innovation and collaboration center. And there's a name in there, the Jarvis Center.
00:00:53
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, there's a really long full name that nobody uses.
00:00:54
margalus
is how I think of it.
00:00:59
Joshua Tsui
So we just call it either the Jarvis Center or the Jarvis Innovation Center.
00:01:03
margalus
There we go. Okay, so now Josh is doing that in academia at DePaul University. And what did I miss? What did I miss, Josh? Tell everybody else what else you need to know.
00:01:13
Joshua Tsui
I think you covered the broad strokes there. The experiential design space was after doing many games and such. And that really involved a lot of location-based type of entertainment and venues and such. So we did things like take over the floor of a Washington DC observatory and designed it out with all kinds of experiences. So there's almost like Disney imaginary type works. And that kind of led to a lot of the initiatives that we're doing over at DePaul now, which is really interesting.
00:01:43
margalus
That's cool. I want to talk a little bit about that maybe leading in, which is like place making, right? And, you know, I've been conducting some of these interviews for the podcast and the thing that keeps coming up is that a place, like an actual place is important for an initiative. You can have an initiative as an idea. But having it have a home in physical space is
Physical vs. Digital Experiences
00:02:05
margalus
interesting. I was just in Portland for a conference in a semi-abandoned mall. And there was actually an arcade there. And I was trying to talk to my kids about how special it was to be able to play arcade games in a mall back in the day. And they asked me what a mall was, not even just what an arcade was. And I know that's probably near and dear to your heart
00:02:27
margalus
as well, but but that's a place that's a place where games are played. I wonder, you know, with all that rambling context that I just gave you, what's the importance of a place, whether it's an arcade or it's an innovation center, or it's, you know, a place that you're putting together for for an experience for people?
00:02:45
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point you brought up because I, you know, your kid not knowing what a mall is, blows my Gen X mind, right? And so, you know, I, I grew up practically living in a mall. And by extension, you know, the whole arcades, and this was in the 80s, and I said, you know, by extension, the whole arcades and everything was all kind of centered around that. And For myself, in my point of view, having places like a mall or an arcade where you're physically out of your house is such a completely different experience. Let's focus on video games. Obviously, the vast majority of people now play video games at home.
00:03:28
Joshua Tsui
you're entertaining yourself and even people watching movies, more people to watch movies at home now than theaters. And then that's fine and it works and everything, but you're not really taking yourself out physically from somewhere and experiencing something. So you're really going, in my opinion, you're getting half the experience of really being immersed in something. And so in the case of the arcades, you know, if you want to go play a video game, you physically have to leave the house to go play a game. And that game is in a cabinet and that cabinet is almost acts as like a portal or a cubicle around that kind of surrounds you a little bit. If you think about a game like Pac-Man, where you're looking down at the screen and there's almost like horse blinders around the screen,
00:04:13
Joshua Tsui
your level of concentration is just insane at that point and you become very immersed in that game even though it's super simple compared to games now. So I liken it to when people say that if you hand write notes as you're listening to a lecture, let's say, you're going to absorb the information a lot more. I think that the physical interaction makes such a big difference inside.
00:04:30
margalus
Yeah.
00:04:35
Joshua Tsui
So when you talk about plays, and you're in a physical area or physical space that's not your home and such. I just think that it becomes more of a piece of memory that is going to stick with you. And I think that's why you'll get a lot of people my age and the next generation who talk so fondly of things like the malls and arcades and things like that because it's heavily imprinted on us because of all of that mental and physical interaction at the same time.
Role and Benefits of Innovation Centers
00:05:21
margalus
Can innovation happen anywhere? Probably. But why have a place for that?
00:05:25
Joshua Tsui
Sure.
00:05:27
margalus
What's the importance of that?
00:05:28
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, yes, technically, innovation can happen anywhere, you know, if somebody, it'd be it's kind of like education in many ways, like you can technically learn anything off the internet if you really wanted to, you know, like, you know, When I produced my documentary, I learned about documentary editing just off of YouTube videos and such. And I just got enough information to be able to pull it off.
00:05:49
margalus
Yeah.
00:05:53
Joshua Tsui
But the thing about an innovation center is that You're getting information, but you're also getting interaction with people. And I think the best example why places like innovation centers and just places are important is that you're going somewhere with a focus, but you're opening yourself up to what I like to call happy accidents, random things that can happen because you're in a different physical space.
00:06:21
margalus
Mm.
00:06:25
Joshua Tsui
You're opening yourself up to that randomness. And if you look at just life in general, so much of what we learn are things that are completely unplanned. And so if you're not going to places, let's say if you're doing everything in front of the computer or any type of screen that you have at home, everything is very focused. You know what you want and that's what you're going to get. You go somewhere and YouTube, you go watch a video and YouTube is going to, via the algorithms, keep feeding you the same things over and over again. And there's nothing
00:06:58
Joshua Tsui
Well, I shouldn't say there's nothing wrong with it. There's plenty of things that are wrong with that.
00:07:01
margalus
Hm.
00:07:01
Joshua Tsui
But its focus is fine. But the thing is that when you go to a place like Innovation Center or any of that place, you're going there with intent, with certain intentions and such. And you're going to find it. But because of the random nature of other people around or other technology that might happen to be there, even the layout of furniture could inspire you. You're inundated with a lot of different things to hit your senses and those accidents that come out of it are ultimately probably what's going to make whatever you're trying to do much more interesting.
00:07:37
margalus
Yeah, I like that. There's a concept of I think it's third spaces or third places.
00:07:42
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:07:42
margalus
Have you heard of this? Yeah. Where, you know, most of our time is spent at home or at work and boat or in the case of a student in a classroom, I suppose. And both of these are highly controlled environments at home. We're able to control the temperature of our house and what we're exposed to.
00:07:56
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:07:59
margalus
And when we go into a classroom or in a workplace, generally we know what to expect as well. The expectations are laid out. And so the idea of third spaces being maybe a coffee house even, but other places where we don't have as much control over the environment is incredibly important for learning. Something, by the way, we lost a lot during the pandemic as I'm thinking about it.
00:08:20
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:08:21
margalus
There was no space for that. And so, you know, we try to do that online and that didn't really work out very well.
00:08:26
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, no, yeah,
Curating Innovation Spaces
00:08:28
Joshua Tsui
you're totally right.
00:08:28
margalus
Yeah.
00:08:29
Joshua Tsui
I during the pandemic, I it drove me crazy to be at home in my, you know, basement office. And so I ended up going to the library, going to coffee shops. And you didn't mean that I was I had people near me or anything, but I just needed to be able to see Life happening, you know, and it's just so important just again.
00:08:47
margalus
Yeah.
00:08:49
Joshua Tsui
It's just you know, even if things are just very passively happening Outside of you being able to use all your senses to look around things and just see what's going on You know, you know, it's things that are completely unplanned. It was just so important for me
00:09:04
margalus
Yeah. So what's interesting is in developing these kinds of places, you're kind of creating your own version of a sandbox. It's the magic circle that they teach in game design. You're creating this.
00:09:16
Joshua Tsui
Yep.
00:09:16
margalus
You're curating it, though, as the person who runs this center. That's your job, to set the conditions for that space.
00:09:19
Joshua Tsui
Uh-huh.
00:09:24
margalus
I wonder, as you've been developing the Innovation Center over the last year and a half, What, how have you gone about doing that? What are some of the, what are the mental models that you're going through? And like, yes, I want to expose people to this. No, we're not going to get the giant inflatable wavy arm tube thing. We're going to put this in here instead. What's, what are some of the challenges that you, that you've faced and what are the, what is your decision-making process look like when it comes to, you know, what you want to expose students to or what you, how you want to curate that's that third space?
00:09:56
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, you know, when I first started working at the center, you know, I was I, you know, I was very, I'm very new to academia, you know, I never worked at a university before. So I came in with certain assumptions that I had in my mind that that may work for the innovation center. So but I kind of came in with a blank slate. And so the way I started off was, you know let's find out what is going on around the center itself not the center inside of it but what else is going on and so one of the unusual things about the jobs innovation center is that it's servicing three kind of different schools of the that you know the cdm which is the
00:10:40
Joshua Tsui
College of Computing and Digital Media comprises of the School of Cinematic Arts, which is the film school, the School of Design, and the School of Computing. And so those are three kind of different schools that have some through lines between them, but they all have their own different initiatives and agendas. And so the Innovation Center is servicing three different types of students. And so I wanted to take probably like a first year or so just to find out what are the needs.
00:11:10
Joshua Tsui
Like I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. What's going on in each of those schools and how do I help extend it and make a center that will get people to work with each other.
00:11:21
margalus
Hmm. Hmm.
00:11:23
Joshua Tsui
I think it's a very long way of me saying, what can we put in the center that is going to apply to not just a film student, but to somebody who's, let's say, a UX designer.
00:11:36
margalus
Mm hmm.
00:11:36
Joshua Tsui
I want to make sure that anything that we do, whether it's technology or events and such, can apply to at least two of those three schools. The whole idea is trying to get students and faculty members to break down their silos and think more in terms of interdisciplinary thoughts.
00:11:43
margalus
All right.
00:11:53
Joshua Tsui
Because if I just put in film equipment, well, who cares? There's already a film school that has all that equipment. Why would we need to do this? But it's like if I put in equipment that suddenly a game designer who knows Unreal can learn a little bit about filmmaking, you know, that technology or gear or whatever or event that we're doing applies to both of those schools. That's what we're more interested in. So we kind of spread it lightly for a while just to see what gets some interest and And I came in with some of my own thoughts.
00:12:24
Joshua Tsui
So we kind of seeded a lot of technology and events based off of my background just to start off with.
00:12:29
margalus
Right.
00:12:30
Joshua Tsui
And so that was the first year. And then the second year, we looked at what worked and what didn't work and then started kind of bringing in more feedback from different students and faculty members who use the center a lot and try to figure out what they needed. So it's a growing process. And we keep adding more as we're going along as the center evolves. But like I said, the center is about a year and a half years old. It's only a year and a half years old.
00:12:56
margalus
Yeah.
00:12:57
Joshua Tsui
And so we're just now starting to get our solid footing on which direction we want to go with. Yeah, it's a long way of me just saying I'm just trying, we're still trying to figure it out, but we're starting to kind of bring in more feedback from people who've experienced the center, you know, since we've opened.
00:13:15
margalus
I'm interested in a lot of what you said there, but in two things in particular, you talked about how the first year you started off with your background and also by interviewing people and trying to figure out what they want, which is of course smart.
00:13:26
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:13:31
margalus
I think anybody who makes products or services knows that the place that you start is by finding problems that your audience, your personas have. But then there's always a part of you that goes into something. It has to, otherwise it's not interesting.
00:13:44
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:13:46
margalus
And so one thing I'm interested in is as the center moves forward and you gain all the feedback that you're getting, what's the part of you that's like the unwavering part or, you know, I've referred to it in the past when I'm creating a program as the hill will die on, meaning I don't care what anybody else says, We're doing this one thing and then I'll listen to everybody else and everything else that they say. But this one thing is, you know, is in some way, shape or form
Interdisciplinary Learning and Collaboration
00:14:10
margalus
going to last. So that's one. I'm interested in that. And you also said you looked at what worked and what didn't work.
00:14:17
margalus
I think we too often talk about or think we only can, you know, what we'll learn is from what did work.
00:14:17
Joshua Tsui
Hmm.
00:14:23
margalus
I wonder if you could tell me some of the what didn't works as well. It's not even a two-part question. Two totally different questions I've got for you, and I'm glad that you're writing them down.
00:14:30
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:14:39
margalus
And then the other is, what didn't work for you in that first year, year and a half?
00:14:45
Joshua Tsui
Oh man, you have to give me a second to think about that. There's multiple examples. So I guess there are many hills I'm more than happy to die on. I think that the theme that comes to mind to be honest with you is... But what is... I'm not sure if this is the ultimate hill to die on thing, but it goes back to...
00:15:08
Joshua Tsui
be a long pause. The AI is going to have to fix this long pause.
00:15:09
margalus
The AI is going to solve that for you.
00:15:14
Joshua Tsui
I think one of the most important things to me is
00:15:17
Joshua Tsui
basically getting students to understand the point, how important it is to be very interdisciplinary in nature, creating projects that spans different industries. So, which I guess that leads me to another thing that is a very big passion of mine is making sure that anything you do at the center has some, I would like to hold on a second.
00:15:31
margalus
Mm.
00:15:50
margalus
Well, I think that's interesting.
00:15:51
margalus
What you're talking about with interdisciplinary nature, I think for people who come from industry, that seems like a normal thing. But when you enter academia, particularly when you enter academia in a liberal arts institution, people who are teaching and running programs, they don't think like that at all because there are PhD in physics who got a master's degree in physics, who got a bachelor's degree
00:15:59
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:16:16
margalus
in physics and if you talk to them about what they do it's that they do physics and if you ask them and I've had this conversation before not with all faculty members but with some if you ask them if they want to collaborate with you on something because you see a connection to physics with what you're doing they will tell you Do you understand what the liberal arts are about? They're about like people with deep experience in a discipline, teaching on that discipline and pushing that discipline forward. And that's within that discipline.
00:16:47
margalus
There's no multi discipline or cross discipline.
00:16:49
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:16:50
margalus
There is my discipline and your discipline and never the twain shall meet. So I think while you're saying that, you know, it's It's a foreign concept to a certain group of people, and that is a hill to die on in some ways, right?
00:17:04
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, so you're basically reading my mind. Thank God you've extracted that out of my head. So what I was trying to get at is the, and this is like, you know, The thing that I will commit to, but it's also the thing that is a work in progress that I'm still working through is that I'm very industry focused. And so my thing is, I want students to come in, discover the whole concept of interdisciplinary thinking. So that way, when they're out of school, that they are prepared to take on anything that comes to them.
00:17:43
margalus
Right.
00:17:46
Joshua Tsui
I was a film student in college, but I ended up working video games for 30 years. And I attribute my career in video games into the fact that I learned a lot of different things when I was in college. It wasn't just film. I just happened to get into computer graphics in my senior year, and I learned all these other things. So I was able to combine all these skills. And so not to toot my own horn, but I think that that was a defining moment for me. And that's something that I really want people to understand that, yes, you may be a film student that knows exactly how to use this camera or this piece of software to do your work. But guess what? When you get out in the real world, they don't care about that because that technology is going to change.
00:18:31
Joshua Tsui
You know everything that they learned is gonna change but you need to be open minded enough to be able to tackle on anything that's new out there you know less than five years ago the concept of a person working in film needing to understand what a game engine is.
00:18:31
margalus
Yeah.
00:18:35
margalus
That's right.
00:19:15
Joshua Tsui
So that's always on my mind.
00:19:17
Joshua Tsui
It's just like, how do I... initiate projects or how do I bring in speakers or how do I do it use a center as this platform to get people to understand that you need to learn a little bit of everything doesn't mean that you have to master them all but you need to be exposed to them you need to be exposed to people in the industry that have gone through this so that way when they come out of school they know they know what to expect they're not they're not completely you know confused by the real world so
00:19:34
margalus
Right,
00:19:40
margalus
right.
00:19:45
margalus
Great.
00:19:46
Joshua Tsui
Following up on that, I wouldn't say what went wrong, but it's more like what's been a work in progress is exactly what you said is getting other people to understand this. I don't think the students really have a problem with this at all. But like you said, there are people who have been working, let's say their faculty for 20, 30 years and such, and they know what they know, they know it very well. It completely threw me off when I realized exactly what you said, that they want to just focus on their thing.
00:20:17
Joshua Tsui
They don't necessarily want to, they don't have the time and I don't blame them to really go off and go in different directions and add other things to their students' experiences.
00:20:21
margalus
Right. Right.
00:20:28
Joshua Tsui
And so that's a big challenge for us is to be the place for that to happen because I don't want to burden other people with our initiatives.
00:20:36
margalus
Right.
00:20:37
Joshua Tsui
And so trying to figure out, well, how do we thread that needle where we want to make sure that other people in the university are involved and we want to do big collaborative and innovative things that's going to take multiple groups to get together because everyone's busy
Measuring Success and Project Examples
00:20:52
Joshua Tsui
and such. So our challenge is, how do we get this going? How do we become, how do we create that funnel and we help control it and make sure that these things happen within the system and not overburdening others?
00:21:06
margalus
Right. That's right. The incentive structures aren't necessarily there for academics to work outside of their discipline because you have to write papers and publish in places within your discipline.
00:21:12
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:21:20
margalus
You have to do work. give conference talks within your discipline and you're not going to find somebody who's in philosophy speaking at an association of computing and machinery conference necessarily.
00:21:25
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:21:30
Joshua Tsui
Sorry.
00:21:37
margalus
But at the same time, if you are a computer science student and all you learn is computer science and you go into the job market and you're practicing that discipline, your boss is never going to ask you to read Kant is the way that I've put it. there's so much value in that. So if you're able to at least get a taste of that in higher ed before you move off and work in that discipline, you know, even better.
00:22:02
Joshua Tsui
Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:04
margalus
I wonder what, as we're thinking of like the problems that you're, not problems, challenges that you're outlining,
00:22:05
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:22:11
margalus
to go back to the other side of what your goals are and how you measure those goals. And I think we were talking about this a little bit before we hit record. How do you measure success? What do you look at success as a year and a half in?
00:22:22
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:22:24
margalus
Keeping in mind you're a year and a half in, so these change over time.
00:22:27
margalus
What are the things that you're looking at in the center as, I hate to use key performance indicators, but basically key performance indicators, right?
00:22:34
Joshua Tsui
Yeah,
00:22:37
Joshua Tsui
I think there are a few different ones. The easiest one is just because the center being so young, we're in kind of what I call growth mode. And so really, it's just traffic, seeing are there more students coming in, more unique students coming in, where are they coming in from, and just seeing that growth. That's super important for me because when you get the traffic in, then you can get the information out to more people and then they get that out to their peers. That's a super easy KPI. I think the one that's still in progress, but I'm starting to see growth in it is
00:23:11
Joshua Tsui
student projects that are very interdisciplinary in nature.
00:23:13
margalus
Hmm.
00:23:15
Joshua Tsui
And I know the term interdisciplinary is kind of broad and such, you know, but the way I look at it is, you know, are there more projects from any of these schools that, you know, are cross collaborations with other students?
00:23:15
margalus
Mm hmm.
00:23:29
Joshua Tsui
And so, you know, a great example is, you know, a couple of school of design students created this
00:23:30
margalus
Thank you.
00:23:37
Joshua Tsui
this kiosk, like, is this like this kiosk system, or it was people using AI, people would put in a photo of themselves into this kiosk, and then it would, you know, these touchscreens would show what AI can do to their memories and stuff is all about the whole concept of how, you know, will people's memories be affected by AI in the future? So they did this really cool museum exhibit.
00:24:01
margalus
Mm.
00:24:03
Joshua Tsui
And the nice thing about it was that I saw the work they were doing and we ended up helping them out at the center because this was a UX project that involved AI, that involved hardware and programming and game engineering and everything. And when we saw that, it's like, this is great because it's designed with technology, you know, and there was some forward thinking to it and there was fabrication involved with it. That was the other part that I'm super interested in is it's not just software or content, but how do you create physical objects that people can interact with?
00:24:38
Joshua Tsui
So
Embracing and Introducing Technology
00:24:38
margalus
All right.
00:24:38
Joshua Tsui
this project was a great example of it.
00:24:41
Joshua Tsui
And when I saw that project, the students, they work at the center a lot. And my hope was that just being around the centers and talking about things like museum exhibits and fabrication and even arcade machines and stuff, that that kind of inspired these students to go in that direction. So starting to see more and more of that where people are taking the technology we have at the center. And we have a lot of random technology there, but getting inspired by it, you know, early on, and we're still this whole work in progress, but early on, we decided we're going to buy technology
00:25:08
margalus
Mm.
00:25:19
Joshua Tsui
that may, may or may not be related to anything, any complete any project that's going on. You know, so you know, in this a little bit of me putting myself out there, where it's like, I see something that's coming up with some emerging technology, and I find it interesting. And in my head, if I can figure out that, hey, this might inspire students from these three different schools to give it a try and learn something and maybe experiment with it. If it hits some of these targets, then we're going to go ahead and just buy it without even knowing if somebody is going to use it or not.
00:25:50
margalus
Yeah.
00:25:53
Joshua Tsui
Because if we put enough toys in the sandbox, let's say, And the kids come in and play, they might discover something that they didn't even think about. And that's another big goal of ours is to make sure that this technology is there, it's accessible. You're really trying to democratize some of this emerging technology by being super accessible to them.
00:26:17
margalus
Give me the most used and least used. And on top of that, I think maybe what you think should be used, but nobody quite is yet. I interviewed Jake from, Jake Deraka from Northwestern.
00:26:26
Joshua Tsui
Oh, man.
00:26:31
margalus
He's episode one this season, I guess is what I'm calling it.
00:26:34
Joshua Tsui
God.
00:26:35
margalus
And Jake talked about his love for this new 3D printer that he's got. that prints like five times faster than others. And he just, we geeked out on 3d printing for maybe about 10 minutes. Um, and I thought that was a really interesting though, because there's like, there's the stuff that you see and people aren't using it. And you're like, Oh, that's a big mess. There's the stuff that you've got where people are using the heck out of it. And then there's that one thing off in the corner where you're like, why aren't you guys using this thing? This is like the coolest thing ever. And I just want somebody to pay attention to it.
00:27:06
Joshua Tsui
That's a good question. I would say the thing that's being the most used are the VR headsets. And I'm actually kind of surprised by that because VR has been around for a while and the hype has kind of died down a little bit.
00:27:14
margalus
Yeah.
00:27:20
Joshua Tsui
But the usefulness of the technology for various things is still very high. So that gets used a lot. And a lot of it is because we have a lot of game design students using the center. And this past year, Alan Turner, the chair of the games department, he's working on this really interesting vr project so he has a lot of students helping him out on that but i think that kind of has helped rekindle interest in it just because you can do so many different things within nachos game so i think people are kind of rediscovering that so that's probably the most used i think
00:28:00
Joshua Tsui
the least used but I think has the greatest potential and I think it's only least used because we just got it recently and it's not super well known that we have it and I think we need to get some case studies out there so people can get inspired by it is this virtual production setup that we got in the center.
00:28:12
margalus
Mm.
00:28:21
Joshua Tsui
Everyone knows that virtual production is using Unreal Engine for compositing videos and things like that. But when I look at that technology, it can be used for so many other things. I have it in my head of how it can be used and I just need to basically get one project done with a technology that isn't an obvious virtual production thing to get people inspired to look out and say, oh, shoot, I didn't realize we can do that in here. And so a good example is using the same tech, we can basically pre-visualize, let's say, an entire scene of a movie. So if a student wants to storyboard something or basically
00:29:06
Joshua Tsui
you know, pre visualize a film that they're thinking about, they can come into the center, use this virtual production tech that we have where we have sensors on the camera.
00:29:12
margalus
Mm hmm.
00:29:16
Joshua Tsui
So people can basically move, use a real camera, but record all the motion of it, including the focal length and the zoom and everything, all this data that they can reuse inside of a game engine. And bring in virtual actors using our mocap system that uses it that's all camera based and basically film something digitally as if it was in real life. And I'm probably doing a very bad description of this.
00:29:44
margalus
Mm.
00:29:47
Joshua Tsui
But basically, you know, they can, they can record all the motions of an actor, all the camera moves and everything. go take it into the game engine and look at everything and change however they want, decide that they want to change the camera angles and stuff, and basically come out with their entire film digitally, look at and edit it, and look at and say, this is the film I want to make, and then go off and shoot it with real actors on real sets later on.
00:30:15
margalus
I see.
00:30:15
Joshua Tsui
It takes all the guesswork out of things. And so it's almost like taking an animation approach to live-action filmmaking. And there's just a lot of power with that.
00:30:22
margalus
I see.
00:30:26
Joshua Tsui
And I can explain this to people, but it's not until we just have somebody do it to show, hey, this is what we're talking about.
00:30:34
margalus
So it's like another, it's like a more advanced step in prototyping. It's, it's, you know, you start out with sketching and storyboarding and all that sort of stuff and you get higher and higher fidelity as you progress through it.
00:30:38
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:30:45
margalus
And this is like, this is, this sounds like a new, a new tool to insert in the high fidelity prototyping phase of, of, of cinema where.
00:30:54
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you like you don't have to storyboard at all.
00:30:55
margalus
Yeah.
00:30:57
Joshua Tsui
That's the thing is that you want, you know, being a filmmaker, when the most when the most frustrating thing is, I know the shots I want, but if I want a storyboard, it's gonna be me drawing stick figures, or if I'm a professional, you know, Hollywood type, I'd hire a storyboarder and such, but you're still not getting exactly what you want.
00:30:57
margalus
Right. Oh yeah. Right.
00:31:13
Joshua Tsui
It's all in 2d, you know, on piece of paper, here's basically,
00:31:16
margalus
Yeah.
00:31:17
Joshua Tsui
You can play around with anything you want all virtually and then you have a completed piece of video that then you can just shoot towards.
00:31:26
margalus
Interesting. When you were talking about getting case studies out there, it sounds like this is Josh making the case. You're going to have to take it upon yourself to build these things.
00:31:34
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:31:36
margalus
I'm wondering, is that typically how you find yourself getting people engaged with technology or are there processes or systems that can be put in place to to encourage people to take those kinds of chances or is it you know because I found myself in this position often as well where it's like there's this there's this thing and uh yeah maybe it's hubris but it's like I'm like nobody sees it except for me and so I'm going to show them this thing and then they're going to use it and and that that works oftentimes but it's also draining it's it's it's like you know
00:32:10
Joshua Tsui
Yeah. It's not scalable, that's for sure.
00:32:13
margalus
Right, right.
00:32:15
margalus
So I wonder, as you've been developing the center out over the last year and a half, what are some things that people have glommed on to independently and why?
00:32:22
Joshua Tsui
Yep.
00:32:22
margalus
And how do you go about building those systems to allow people to muddle their way or tinker their way over to this piece of technology you're talking about now or really other things as well?
00:32:33
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, I think there are a few different ways.
00:32:34
margalus
Yeah.
00:32:37
Joshua Tsui
So like in the example I just gave, you know, that's something that it's just complicated enough that I feel like, okay, I need to just get this going, you know, at least get the beginnings of it going, you know, and basically make it an internal project for the center, and then find, you know, the right students or faculty members to partner up with. And And they can end up having it be a student project or a project for the class, but I'd be kind of managing that or basically being the visionary behind it.
00:32:57
margalus
Mm.
00:33:06
Joshua Tsui
So something that's more complicated like that, I think it would have to go in that direction. I think the The other way, the other thing that we've been doing that I just kind of mentioned is, you know, finding like-minded faculty members who are teaching classes that are somewhat related to what we want to do. A great example is we had a USD class basically Um, doing an internal project for the Java center that we basically commissioned out.
00:33:38
Joshua Tsui
And so on our end of things, it's still us setting up the initiative for it, but it's, but at that point it was very high level.
00:33:38
margalus
Hmm.
00:33:45
Joshua Tsui
Like this is, Hey, this is what we want. can you think your class would be interested in doing this?
00:33:49
margalus
Right.
00:33:52
Joshua Tsui
Because at that point, it becomes kind of like a client project, even though we're all internal. And so that worked out really well. So we ended up having a group of students create an AI motion capture system just using off-the-shelf hardware. And our high-level you know, goal for them was we wanted we just want to do motion capture. We want to experiment with motion capture and utilizing just regular webcams and computers, nothing expensive or anything. How far can we push the technology? What can you find that will work on here, you know, working with something like this?
00:34:30
Joshua Tsui
But that's it. That's all we told them. And so we found a faculty member who had a class that would work well with us and she found the students and then that became the project for that quarter. So collaboration with like-minded faculty is super important for us and be that as kind of like a pipeline for some of these initiatives.
00:34:42
margalus
Wow.
00:34:51
margalus
Interesting. As we're talking about collaborations with faculty, I'm thinking back to a couple other interviews that I've done for this podcast. And they always revisit the idea of partnerships. I think, you know, it seems like when you are at the head of an innovative initiative within an institution, particularly an older institution that goes about its business in a certain way, developing those kinds of partnerships is important, whether it's with, you know, line and rank folks, faculty, students,
00:35:28
margalus
But also, you know, having those partnerships with administrators, with people who are exposed to tribal knowledge and understand the unwritten laws of how the institution functions and things like that.
00:35:36
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:35:40
margalus
I'm wondering, you know, as you've been developing this space over the last year and a half, What are some of the key, you know, you've talked about faculty, but are there other kind of key partnerships or groups that you've looked to within the institution that have helped you and why do you think that is?
00:35:58
Joshua Tsui
Hmm.
00:36:02
margalus
Like, what is it about that group or that person that has helped your innovation initiative at DePaul move forward?
00:36:12
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, there's been quite a few people that we've been working with and they all come in from different angles. Believe it or not, the Career Services Office has been great in terms of collaboration.
00:36:23
margalus
Hmm.
00:36:24
Joshua Tsui
I think it's because of the industry focus that we tend to have and such.
00:36:27
margalus
Hmm.
00:36:29
Joshua Tsui
And so when we bring in, let's say speakers from different industries and things like that, we always get the Career Center people involved with that, or at least aware of it, because it's not like they're going to come in and start talking about recruiting to these folks who are coming in. But just basically, if they see that there's a good connection there and they want to somehow get involved, so there's a bit of an introduction, so later on down the road, some things can come out of it. They'll come in down to do it. A lot of times,
00:36:59
Joshua Tsui
They'll also have, they might be working with people with other companies, let's say, already that are that and they have like relations where, you know, the polls interns are working there on a regular basis and such, they might come to us and say, Hey, you know what, they, you know, they're interested in whatever this and the other thing that seems to be related to what we're doing at the job center, they'll, they'll contact us, you know, because we built that relationship with them.
00:37:23
margalus
Right.
00:37:25
Joshua Tsui
So that, So that's been a very good partnership. I can't remember the department's names and my apologies,
Institutional and External Partnerships
00:37:31
Joshua Tsui
but there are certain departments that basically work with companies for grants and sponsorships and things like that.
00:37:32
margalus
Yeah.
00:37:39
margalus
Yeah.
00:37:39
Joshua Tsui
There are companies that want to get involved with universities in some ways.
00:37:43
Joshua Tsui
And so we make a point of telling them, hey, here's Here are some initiatives we have going on. We have this thing called the Jarvis Challenge that's coming up in the fall. It's kind of like a Shark Tank type of pitch contest. And we mentioned that to this one department.
00:38:00
Joshua Tsui
They said, oh, you know what? There's a company that we work with that would probably be interested in being a part of this.
00:38:04
margalus
Okay.
00:38:05
Joshua Tsui
And so it was just an idea on our end of things. But now that we got them involved, and they're talking with some corporate sponsorships and such, now it forces us to become more serious about it. It was just an initial idea at first, but now they're forcing us to give us some momentum, which is great.
00:38:17
margalus
Right, right.
00:38:23
Joshua Tsui
It kicks us in the ass to take it as seriously as possible. Groups like that have been great to be around. But in general, to kind of go back to like-minded faculty members and such, I've been very fortunate that We've had quite a few different people from all over DePaul wanting to work with us and who are very like-minded and such.
00:39:01
margalus
Yeah.
00:39:06
Joshua Tsui
we would like to know more about what's going on with AI or we'd like to know what's going on with immersive tech VR. It's interesting, I'm doing a workshop for the humanities people in the fall for VR because I happened to show one of them a documentary that was made for VR that was incredibly well done. It really got the point of the subject matter because you're immersed in it. And it blew her away. And so she asked, like, can you come in and do a demo for every faculty member here?
00:39:35
Joshua Tsui
Because, you know, because we see this as a great teaching tool.
00:39:35
margalus
Hmm.
00:39:39
Joshua Tsui
And so this is outside of CDM. But it's like, it totally makes sense. It's like, you know, people should be aware Of what's out there and in this case, you know the technology that's out there that may further what their goals are so yeah, so like I said, you know the partnerships kind of go all over the place and Again, I'm in that growth mode phase where it's like I'll talk to anybody about anything You know because I just you just never know what can come out of it
00:40:07
margalus
That's great. I mean, it sounds like, you know, as well on the administrative side or on the on the side of people who have, you know, in sales, they would call it like access to power. The people who make who can get who who could impede you if they chose to.
00:40:20
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:40:23
margalus
It sounds like you've got the support that you need to be successful and make these partnerships with other faculty members and outside partners and things like that, which which is, you know, an important component of of running these kinds of initiatives, I would think, within these larger institutions.
00:40:40
margalus
If you don't have that support, if you have people who are invested in business being done as usual, then it's really hard to develop these kinds of partnerships that might seem although they're not seem strange or foreign to people who are, you know, used to business being done a certain way.
00:40:56
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:40:57
margalus
I mean, do you find like another leading question, I guess, but is that you're getting that kind of support? Is that, you know, how do you or how do you gain and sustain that kind of support, you know, from the people who, who, who are making, you know, decisions at DePaul?
00:41:16
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, yeah, one of the big. things that I asked for when I was up for this job was, how much autonomy do I have with the center?
00:41:27
margalus
Mmhmm.
00:41:28
Joshua Tsui
And I've been very fortunate in that the center just was just opening. My position is completely new at DePaul. They've never had anyone like this in there. And so everything was new. So I've been very fortunate that they gave me so much autonomy. Basically they're like, they basically told me, We don't know what the center is going to be. Here's a couple of high level things, but we want you to make it how you think it should be, which was amazing.
00:41:54
margalus
Mmhmm.
00:41:57
margalus
All
00:41:58
Joshua Tsui
Again, I didn't think I was ever going to work in academia because I come from, for lack of a better time, I come from the tech world and even the startup world.
00:42:08
Joshua Tsui
be in positions where I have a lot of control for better or for worse, you know, and be able to guide the ship and be able to at least for a certain amount of time be left alone.
00:42:12
margalus
right.
00:42:19
Joshua Tsui
Like if we're going to grow something, please just let me, you know, run with it. until it seems like I shouldn't be running it.
00:42:24
margalus
Right.
00:42:27
Joshua Tsui
And so I got lucky in that.
00:42:27
margalus
Right.
00:42:29
Joshua Tsui
And so that has helped a lot in terms of obviously my job satisfaction, but also just helping the center grow and go beyond what the original idea was. I don't think that's going to happen if the center was anchored down by any particular department or school or anything like that. you know, when I say that we're part of CDM, you know, CDM has these three schools. And the center services all three of those schools, but it's also not part of any of those schools, you know, we're completely an island.
00:42:58
margalus
Right.
00:43:00
Joshua Tsui
And so, and so that, you know, comes with a lot of benefits because we, you know, Everybody, all three schools ironically feels like they have some ownership of the center, even though none of them do, which is perfect because they all come in and they want to use it, and they all have equal access to it and such.
00:43:13
margalus
Right. Yes.
00:43:20
Joshua Tsui
But on my end, I can tell them, well, yes, you can use it, but what you're wanting to use it for makes no sense. You have your own center to do that stuff. But if one of them comes in and says, hey, I have this event or I have this idea I want to do, And going back to what we talked about earlier, and it involves some other disciplines. Fantastic. Come on in. We'll give you the world. We'll help you out on it. So that's been really great. And I think that's, in the long run, that's what's going to make the center super unique within the university itself.
00:43:51
margalus
Yeah, I think that's, you know, it's important for people to feel like they are owners of a space because that is how they become, they come to feel like they're part of the community as well. You have to own a piece of it. You have to own a piece of the land, you know, in order, you got to be a landowner in order to feel like you're invested in the community. I don't know if that's a good metaphor, but I feel like it's okay, or at least it's getting close enough there.
00:44:11
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:44:17
margalus
So, I mean, that's, a rough segue, but it's a kind of segue, some kind of a segue into like, what are some of the lessons that you've learned in the last year and a half as you've been developing the space? What are some key takeaways for other people who are developing these centers? I also kind of wonder, What are some spaces that you looked at when you were developing the center that you drew inspiration from?
Balancing Industry and Academia
00:44:47
margalus
So kind of a two-ish part question is, where do you look for inspiration and what are things that you've learned kind of independently as well?
00:44:50
Joshua Tsui
Sure.
00:44:56
Joshua Tsui
So in terms of what I've learned, you're going to the first part is, and it's something it's still a work in progress for me, I'll be completely honest, is that I come from the games industry, I come from the experiential design industry where it was very much top-down type of control.
00:45:15
margalus
Mmhmm.
00:45:16
Joshua Tsui
So having had my own company or being in high positions at various companies, It was basically, here's what we're doing, now let's start making it. But it comes from the top. You have the project, and then you bring the team together to create it. With the center, and just by nature working with students, it's very much the opposite. what do students want to do and how do we help them make it and such?
00:45:49
Joshua Tsui
And so that was literally the opposite of what my thinking was. Like if I had a game studio, it wouldn't necessarily be, oh, hey, the type of game studio we had was a work for higher studio.
00:45:54
margalus
Right.
00:46:01
Joshua Tsui
So we would never have a situation where it's like, hey, what do people in the studio want to make? Now let's go make it. If we're like an indie game studio, that would be the case, but that's not the industry that I come from. And so coming into working at DePaul, it is like an indie game studio where it's like, what do you guys want to do? Do we have the stuff to help you make it and such? And that totally makes sense. I still struggle with that a little bit, not so much that the students can make their own projects. Obviously, they have to make their own projects. But in terms of moving the innovation center forward, in my mind, I have an idea of these are the things that we need to do. These are certain projects that I want to have.
00:46:41
Joshua Tsui
to hang our hats on so when people come see the Innovation Center, they can see this or these projects that really represent the center. And some of them, and I'm hoping most if not all of them come from students, but because we're in that growth phase, I would really like to just do the top down thing for a couple of projects.
00:47:02
margalus
Yeah.
00:47:04
Joshua Tsui
A, I have a very good idea of what would resonate really well with people. And it would also benefit the students to work on some projects like this because the project students want to do are great. But if there's some intervention to make them even greater, that'd be fantastic. So I have to strike this balance of, here's what I want to do. I would love to force you all to make it, but I can't do that. So how do I balance those out?
00:47:35
margalus
Having done that side of things for a while, you know that most of those studios fail. They take five years to make something. It is an extremely painful learning process. And to watch multiple student groups in your space, in your center, Going through that right and and you know they're probably going down a path that's going to lead them towards.
00:47:59
Joshua Tsui
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:05
margalus
Very very little if anything at all is is hard and and i think that learning to set the conditions.
00:48:10
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:48:14
margalus
going back to the sandbox, learning to put the right technology or the right conditions in place that maybe encourages more of them to take a better path is one approach. But I'm still figuring some of that out now that I'm at this new institution as well. How do you set the conditions so that you at least get a couple of successful projects?
00:48:33
margalus
Or how do you provide students with that advice so it's not like, here's what you should do, but it's more like, here's what I've done in the past or here's what I would do if I were in your shoes.
00:48:33
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:48:41
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:48:45
margalus
That's a pickle. I don't know where I'm going with that.
00:48:46
Joshua Tsui
It is.
00:48:47
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:48:48
margalus
There's no question at the end of this.
00:48:48
Joshua Tsui
Yeah. Yeah, no, no. And I haven't solved for a deal. The only thing I can think of is it's like, it's like being a parent, but being a parent to a ton of kids, you know, and because, you know, it's like, as a parent, you, you want to make sure your kids are doing the, you know, are on the right path, but also you want them to make the mistakes that they're going to learn from, you know, and so it's the same thing here, just on a massive scale and such.
00:48:59
margalus
Mm-hmm.
00:49:10
margalus
Right. Right.
00:49:14
Joshua Tsui
And so, you know, just professionally, though, like, it's a, You know, it's very interesting to be, you know, to be in this type of situation because like you said, I'll see something and I think to myself, you know, I could, I could tell them something that could solve a lot of these problems, but then at the same time, is that the right thing to do? You know, and again, it's like, yeah, I would love to have them.
00:49:35
margalus
Yeah.
00:49:37
Joshua Tsui
There's a project I have in mind. I would love to get this going. you know, the center can fund it. And I can probably build this team of students to work on it. But then it's like, you know, it's but then it's not their project, is that going to be worth it? There's all this all these questions. And so yeah, so that's been, that's, you know, that's just one of the weird situations that I find myself in.
00:49:58
margalus
So you're still figuring out what your litmus test is of should I intervene or not? It sounds like.
00:50:03
margalus
Yeah.
00:50:07
Joshua Tsui
And I think it's the way it should be. It's on a per project basis on things.
00:50:13
margalus
Yeah.
00:50:13
Joshua Tsui
But that's what makes life interesting.
00:50:16
margalus
That's right. I mean, I think of my students oftentimes, like I think about clay, and that is that, and I'm by no means claiming to be an artist who works with the medium. But if I were, I would think of it like I was having a conversation with the material and trying to understand how it wanted to speak. and then kind of putting myself into some of that and students are the same way.
00:50:34
Joshua Tsui
Go.
00:50:37
margalus
You're trying to figure out how to have a conversation with them and how they want to speak, but you're also trying to give them a path to do that in the most efficient way.
00:50:47
Joshua Tsui
Go.
00:50:48
margalus
Okay, just a couple more questions and then I think we'll be good.
00:50:50
Joshua Tsui
Sure.
00:50:52
margalus
We'll wrap it. I'll leave you alone for the rest of the day.
00:50:55
Joshua Tsui
That's all right.
00:50:56
margalus
But you were talking about developing partnerships. You've got this new, almost kind of like a pitch competition that you're doing and you've got a partner for that. I know that you ran Robomoto for a long time and you had an awesome partner, I would assume, or at least I see you talk about Tony Hawk. And you've got some kind of a relationship that you've developed there as well. And relationships in general, particularly for these centers, bringing in outside voices or the outside in, seem to be critical because there's only a certain amount of knowledge that the institution internally can generate before it eats itself.
00:51:23
Joshua Tsui
Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:32
margalus
How do you go about developing those partnerships or those relationships or those connections with those outside individuals or groups? How do you think about that? And how do you make it worth both their while and your while when you're developing those sorts of things? Because that's something I see you as being really good at is developing those professional connections.
00:51:51
Joshua Tsui
I think a lot of it, at least right now, is based off of my connections that I've cultivated throughout my career and such. A lot of the industry people are people I've known for decades now from all the various industries that I've been in. I've been taking advantage of a lot of my friendships that I've had.
00:52:10
margalus
Hmm.
00:52:12
Joshua Tsui
You know, just like with any network, you know, it keeps growing and growing and such. And so, you know, as long as, you know, the people that I've been bringing in that I'm good friends with have had good experience, you know, with the center, they'll recommend others, you know, you know, to come along or they'll introduce me to, you know, their people. So I've been, you know, I've been kind of the hub of, of that, you know, in terms of industry, you know, as we develop further, you know, my network can only go so far. And it's kind of, you know, it's a little bit more focused and such. But you obviously want to broaden that out.
Future Vision and Initiatives
00:52:44
Joshua Tsui
And so once again, that comes down to, you know, what other departments or administrative departments at DePaul have industry outreach and and how do I make sure that I'm available to them. So
00:52:56
margalus
Mm.
00:52:57
Joshua Tsui
if they see a potential partner, they know that they can come to me to be someone to talk to.
00:53:04
Joshua Tsui
One of the other things that we started to do was this thing called the Jarvis Innovation Partnerships, which basically is myself acting as an agent for a few different studios or groups within DePaul. And A good example is we have a local museum that the CEO was talking to the vice president, well, I should say, the chief of staff to the president of DePaul. And I happened to talk with the chief of staff about this partnership that we have. And so he
00:53:39
Joshua Tsui
He basically said, you know what, you should talk to these people here at this museum, you know, come down and they came down and we talked and I told them about this partnership that we have with these studios that create anything from games to, you know, to fabrication to, you know, to, to software and such.
00:53:53
margalus
Mm
00:53:54
Joshua Tsui
And they had some the museum has initiatives that they wanted to do but they didn't know who to go to at the polls so i became that hub. And i bring that up is that was that was always a goal of mine was to have the innovation center be a hub of information for people outside of the poll so when a museum or company has a project or has some ideas. you know, they know who to go to, instead of going to three or four different departments, they can come to the Java Center and talk to me.
00:54:17
margalus
hmm.
00:54:23
Joshua Tsui
And then I get them hooked up with the right people, you know, to get their initiatives going. And so again, that was just, you know, my relationship with the chief of staff of the president or my relationship with other, you know, you know, administration within DePaul to kind of get the word out that, you know, that there's a one place that people can go to. And so from there, the network grows. I hope that answers your question.
00:54:46
margalus
No, it does, it does. And also I think that you do it so naturally that you might not think of the things that other people don't do very naturally, but just the very fact that you were able to put together
00:54:56
Joshua Tsui
Sure.
00:54:59
margalus
you know, as you mentioned, a speaker series of friends, and the speaker series was a lot of people who are like very compelling individuals, that you were able to do that with a network is not something that everybody is able to do. There are not a lot of people who can wave a wand and get, I don't know how many people you brought in, but let's say 10, 12, however many people compelling speakers to come through, just because they have a network like that, you know? And so there's something that you do related to relationship building that I think a lot of folks could learn from, you know, in these centers because there's the concept of bringing the outside in.
00:55:35
margalus
How do you look outside of yourself and find things that could benefit the community that you're shepherding and then bring it into that community and doing it in a way that connects, you know, connects the dots that other people don't see.
00:55:37
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:55:48
margalus
I think that's something you're good at is you connect those, if you don't mind me saying that, like being presumptuous here.
00:55:49
Joshua Tsui
Sure. Oh.
00:55:55
margalus
But that's something that you're good at is connecting those dots. And that's incredibly important.
00:55:59
Joshua Tsui
No, thanks. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's decades of networking, you know, all the way from my early days in video games through, you know, running my own company and working, you know, working with large publishers and such and, you know, that, you know, that network keeps growing and such and people introduce me to other people. And so, you know, and so, you know, I think that's one of the things that has benefited the center again, not to toot my own horn or anything, but it was just kind of like bringing in somebody that wasn't from academia to run the center, I think.
00:56:30
margalus
Yeah.
00:56:31
Joshua Tsui
I think that was, that was a very interesting call by the dean to do that. And obviously, yeah, I'm super happy that she made that call. But I think that that has really benefit because now you have someone like me who brings in people from the outside world, but then but also still partnering with people who are faculty members who a long time who also can help suggest things from their end. And so now we get the best of both worlds kind of colliding in the same space.
00:56:56
margalus
Right, right. Yeah, and that's something that I see as kind of like the future of these spaces within academia. I think that whether it's an innovation center in a larger organization, in a city, or in an academic institution, they all provide that kind of benefit. So wrapping it up, that being part of your future, Um, you open up, you open up the newspaper, I don't know, two, three years from now.
00:57:25
Joshua Tsui
Uh-huh.
00:57:25
margalus
And there's a, are you familiar with this exercise? You open up the newspaper and the big story is something about the innovation, your innovation center.
00:57:34
Joshua Tsui
Mm.
00:57:35
margalus
Right. What is the, what is the headline say? And what's that story about? What's the future look like?
00:57:42
Joshua Tsui
Oh, geez. How many years from now? Two?
00:57:45
margalus
Two, three, two. Yeah, let's do two, three.
00:57:46
Joshua Tsui
Two or three? I think... Gosh, I wish I had known those questions would come up.
00:57:54
margalus
Sorry, this is a fun question.
00:57:56
margalus
So I love doing this question. I'll fill the gap while you think for a second. I love doing this question because the headline thing is really like, where do you want to go? And what are other people going to, what's the thing that grabs other people? It's not just about where you want to go, but if it's a headline in the newspaper, it's also something that other people want to read about.
00:57:57
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, it is fun.
00:58:11
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:58:15
margalus
So it's not just about what you want, but it's about what other people, how you want other people to benefit from what you're doing and attached to it.
00:58:16
Joshua Tsui
Yeah.
00:58:23
Joshua Tsui
I think it's what I would like to see, and I'm going to keep this slightly broad, is a headline stating that a specific part, a specific initiative or project or something that was born out of the center, and it could be attached to any school and stuff, had basically allowed that part of DePaul to be ranked number one.
00:58:48
margalus
Hmm.
00:58:49
Joshua Tsui
you know, amongst universities for this particular program. So I'll speak just selfishly from my background is if I can see that let's say the game development department of DePaul is ranked like number one in the nation because of initiatives that we put into place, you know, that would be fantastic.
00:58:53
margalus
Right.
00:59:06
margalus
Hmm.
00:59:14
margalus
Right. Right. Yeah. A piece that name drops a couple of projects that were incubated in the Innovation Center.
00:59:22
Joshua Tsui
Exactly.
00:59:22
margalus
You know, number one, and then here's like five projects that happened and four out of the five were seated or supported in the center.
00:59:31
Joshua Tsui
Exactly, exactly. So it doesn't have to even name drop the center itself. But just knowing that, hey, did this one have happened if the center wasn't there because, you know, because, you know, I don't know, it's like, you know, because of something that we put in there that Pete net that somebody figured out that was just super innovative and very different.
00:59:52
margalus
Yeah, yeah. Well, Josh, that about wraps it up. Is there anything that you're working on or that you'd like to share with folks that you want them to go to pay attention to? Is there a website? Where can we find what you're working on online?
01:00:08
Joshua Tsui
Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, obviously, just going to DePaul website, looking up the Jarvis Innovation Center, you know, for any information there, I think the, you know, in terms of, you know, what we're working on, I think this, this Jarvis challenge that we're putting together is really our next big thing. The first year of it, we're kind of keeping the scale. relatively small just because we're testing it out. It's the first time we're doing it, but this is something that we're looking to grow quite a bit to the point where we want people to be inspired to make big projects. It's not just something that's within their silo, but something that they can never imagine happening if they didn't get the support of a challenge like this with all the funding and mentoring and everything that comes with it.
01:00:53
Joshua Tsui
I didn't really get into details earlier, but it's basically a challenge where not only would teams from all over DePaul pitch a project that has to be interdisciplinary in nature, but has to be of a certain scale that might be beyond what they can actually do, but with the right resources that the Jarvis Center can supply to them, that they can get it there or you can get it close to there. So by the end of the academic year, they have something really big to show off, not just for the school, but for themselves. And later on, when they go off looking for jobs, they can say they can be a part of something. And so we're looking to get that started. It's been on my mind ever since I first started in this position. And I didn't really want to pull the trigger on until I really understood
01:01:39
Joshua Tsui
what the center is capable of, what students are capable of, what other resources are within the school. But now I think we're really close to being ready to get that launched. So I'm super excited about that.
01:01:50
margalus
Awesome. Josh, I can't thank you enough. Like I said, this is below your station. So I appreciate you joining me and doing this.
01:01:56
Joshua Tsui
Dodges.
01:01:59
margalus
And I think there's a lot in here for people to dig into. So thanks for your time and for doing this.
01:02:06
Joshua Tsui
Thanks for having me. I loved it and I had a great time. Thanks.
01:02:09
margalus
Cool. All right.