Your favourite stories in 2025 showcased powerful collaborations and artists, both emerging and established, working to build a better future.
While “never look back” is advice you may have encountered, we find it tremendously exciting to do so around this time every year. It’s also fitting as we find ourselves wrapping up the first few months of ECU’s centennial celebrations, which will continue through the fall of 2026.
Because, of course, looking back in order to guide the future is the opportunity ECU’s centennial provides. And we’re grateful so many of you have chosen to take on this work along with us. We are always stronger together, and the broader our community, the stronger our foundation for the project of co-creating, exploring, discovering, innovating and making change.
Aside from which, reflecting on what attracted readers over the past 12 months – and digging into the affinities between those stories – unfailingly brings joy and hope.
Never more so than with this year’s most-read stories, which focused on some of the country’s most lauded practitioners as well as on the ways earlier-career artists and designers are using the transformative power of creativity to address today’s most urgent challenges and to catalyze personal, social and cultural change.
Our deepest gratitude to each and every one of you for spending your time with us. We are humbled by your support.
Happy New Year; we look forward to seeing you in 2026.
No. 15 | Inaugural Industrial Design Open Studio Brings Community Insight to Students’ Capstone Projects
“It’s a very real opportunity for students to get ideas, feedback, and have conversations about their projects at a moment where they still have time to take what they hear and run with it,” Charlotte says. “Their work is far enough along that they’ve got something real to show but is still not entirely finalized and set in stone. The Open Studio was timed intentionally to allow them to network and connect, but also to have meaningful, productive conversations about their work with people they might not otherwise encounter.”
No. 14 | Students Create Games with Industry Insight to Hone Professional Skills in Game
“They made an exponential jump from when we first consulted with them,” says Sunny Lee, head of experience design at EA – Full Circle.
“They took an inventive approach to how they used tools and resources to create their projects. And then there were invisible components like navigating team dynamics and personalities. Sometimes, you don’t see eye to eye, but how you reach common ground says a lot. I was impressed with what the students were able to do and how transferable their work was in terms of what I see in the industry.”
No. 13 | Kevin Eastwood Turns Lens on BC Blazes with ‘Wildfire’
“What I hope Wildfire demonstrates is that these firefighters care about the communities and, in fact, are part of the communities,” says Kevin, the series showrunner and co-director.
“As we see throughout the show, they’re affected firsthand by the fires. Sometimes, their own homes have burned down. Some of them have lost family to wildfires. Yet they have a sense of duty which they continue to honour in the face of all this danger. I thought we needed to give them a little more attention.
No. 12 | Asad Aftab and Logan Wilkinson to Show Groundbreaking VR Film at Venice Film Festival
“Everything is purposefully tailored to fit the concept and the experience,” Asad says. “It’s a cinematic VR film, which is a relatively new field, and we quite literally are at the forefront of pushing that format. So, no more games, no more clicking around, no waving your arms. Just experiencing stories.”
No. 11 | Students Collaborate with Acclaimed Artist Tadasu Takamine at Vancouver Art Gallery
“It was an intensive project that put their skills to use in unexpected ways,” says artist and ECU faculty member Emily Hermant, who teaches in the Sculpture + Expanded Practices program at ECU and facilitated student involvement in the VAG performance.
“It was a real-world extension of what we do in the Sculpture program. It put their technical skills and training in contemporary art practice toward a meaningful, experiential purpose, and gave them access to understanding how they can apply what they learn in school in a professional context.”
No. 10 | How Alanis Obomsawin Changed the World
As she looks back on her storied career, a central theme emerges from the reflections of legendary artist and filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. It weaves its way through the entirety of her acclaimed documentary practice, through her early work as a singer, and even back to her childhood. That theme is the power and beauty of the human voice.
No. 9 | 30th Anniversary Indigenous Art Exhibition Highlights Community, Culture and Success at ECU
“Working on this show is never about checking a box for a class or a grade,” says Aaron Rice. “It’s about building relationships and finding ways to honour the humans behind all these artworks. And I always get excited.”
No. 8 | ‘The After Show’ Spotlights Student-Led Exploration of Works by Class of 2025
The nine exhibiting artists met through classwork at ECU, bonding over a mutual recognition of a surpassing commitment to their practices. Throughout their time at ECU, they’d visit each other’s studios, stretching conversations that began casually into years-long dialogues.
“When you see that another artist cares about their work or shares your sense of dedication, you want to join forces to take the art beyond the university and keep the conversation going,” says exhibition co-organizer David Macgillivray.
No. 7 | New Project from Material Matters Research Hub Explores Impact of Wildfire on Land + Community
“Really, this project is about relations,” says Material Matters cofounder and ECU faculty member Hélène Day Fraser.
“It’s about how to build relations with scientists, government, Indigenous communities and one another. We’re asking, where do our materials come from? How do we take responsibility for them? And how can the work we do as designers change relations through the sharing of perspectives?”
No. 6 | Outpost for Unreal Institutions Harnesses Collective Imagination to Explore Public Life
“We very intentionally want to use this space as a means of doing research in public as well as with public — for them to be part of the conversation rather than passive receptors of information,” says designer Samein Shamsher (BDes 2017).
“In turn, that input builds up our own understanding of what these works are, how they function and where the research should go. And the notion that anybody off the street could be part of a research project is really energizing for folks.”
“My biggest takeaway is to be persistent in pursuing your curiosities,” says Abi Simatupang, one of the Buschlen Mowatt Nichol Foundation Award recipients.
“As a designer interested in doing more research-based work, I’ve taken this advice as a call to do exactly that: reach out to communities that inspire me, talk about how design and art affects them, and build what I learn from those experiences into my experimentation with material, typography, and illustration.”
No. 4 | ECU Opens New Graduate Student Studios at Centre for Digital Media
“This expansion will allow us to repurpose spaces on the main campus to support undergraduate education,” says Trish Kelly, President + Vice-Chancellor at ECU.
“It’s also a first look at how we’ll be able to grow to accommodate broader programming for students at all levels and offer a deeper suite of resources and supports for our community members as the False Creek Flats neighbourhood continues to develop around us.”
No. 3 | Ella White Works with Gitanyow Nation to Reframe Story of 1928 Visit by Artist Emily Carr
Led in partnership with the Gitanyow Nation and Mitacs, the research initiative saw Ella combing through public and personal archives, artworks, books and other materials to assemble a narrative for a feature in the Gitanyow Nation’s museum during its grand reopening in 2027.
“Emily Carr writes about visiting the Gitanyow in her book,” Ella says, noting that for nearly a century, this version of the story was the only one most people ever encountered. Ella’s detailed exploration of the Gitanyow’s perspective aims to change that.
No. 2 | Ruth Beer Awarded $368K SSHRC Grant for ‘Land Sea Sky’
“Like oil pipelines, which remain invisible to us when we fill our gas tanks, these digital infrastructures can escape our notice,” says the artist and ECU faculty member.
“Their physicality, installation and use of resources such as energy and water come at a cost, and they are an incredibly powerful agent of change. To study these infrastructures and their potential is to have a new understanding of place. With Land Sea Sky, our intention is to study and highlight these new understandings of place through community engagement, creative practices such as visual art and media, as well as publications.”
No. 1 | Health Design Lab Partners with BC Cancer to Improve Access to Supportive Care
Your #1 most-read story this past year showcased the ways one of Canada’s only research labs dedicated to participatory health design is helping students make a meaningful difference in the communities they call home.
“This partnership demonstrates the role the Health Design Lab (HDL) can play in supporting inclusion of people with lived experience in large organizational initiatives such as service design and strategic planning,” says HDL director Caylee Raber.
“Our team is always mindful of ensuring we create actionable insights from the truly thoughtful things we hear from participants in projects like this one. And then for students, the impact of HDL can be twofold: through the RA position itself and through access to networks and professional opportunities they can foster and develop.”