Mitacs Accelerate Entrepreneur + Don Norman Design Award 2026
Community Live Music Optimization
The diagnostic origin: Rockaoke Live! feat. The Naturals (2014–2024) maintained a catalogue of over 500 songs — simultaneously its primary value proposition and its central operational liability. By IDEO's DFV framework the system was viable, feasible, and desirable right up until collapse. Flynn (forthcoming-a) identifies a Processes-layer failure misread by DFV's miscategorized lenses — the infrastructure required to sustain the format didn't yet exist. This is not a concept failure. It is a Resources-layer failure in a format the market has since validated at scale.
The architectural response: Audiofish™ is a participatory music trivia and Go Fish-based card game platform — music knowledge earns credits redeemable for performance slots, prize payouts, or charitable contribution to confirmed charity partner HeadsUpGuys Society. Megaband™ is the advanced tier: once a regional musician registry reaches critical mass, an optimization engine assembles the best available lineup song-by-song from the community. The system achieves requisite variety by distribution, not attenuation — the catalogue is the community.
BC proof-of-concept proceeds in two phases: Phase 3a at The Alcove Lounge, Vancouver (May–September) and Match Public House, Campbell River (October–February). Phase 3b at Painter's Lodge, Campbell River is the identified Phase 2 deployment site. Technology partners include Singa (karaoke catalogue), Soundtrap (musician onboarding), and fish.audio (AI voice infrastructure — proposed for emcee and coordination layer; design intent, pre-deployment).
Mitacs Accelerate · Applications Structuring
Live Performance Recording as Research Dataset
The National Archives is a 20-year dataset of live performance recordings from the Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver — captured by a student team during Joel Flynn's SFU teaching position, which enabled the multi-camera capability the project required. Brandon Reid (Straight & Narrow Artist Management; former sound engineer for The National) anchors the commercial development relationship.
The research activates the Resources layer: the archival dataset is the resource pool. What organizational processes and value architecture transform a consumer-recorded archive into a commercially and academically viable asset — and what different answers emerge depending on whether restoration, enhancement, or commercialization governs the objective? The project also activates the Light register: can archival video from a live performance context be enhanced and repurposed as an immersive LBE experience?
Designed Visual Engagement in Hospitality Venues
The Light register is architecturally dependent: Sound must exist first. Light restructures perception of Sound without displacing it. This is the |F|D|S|L| schema's foundational principle, confirmed in the prior art of the Desolation Sound System (Flynn, 2006 MASc thesis, Artifact 5.12) — audio primary, sequential visual chapters as the Light layer — and theoretically grounded in Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) and Vertov's (1923) mechanical eye.
Two deployment tracks: (1) programming and coordinating existing AV and lighting infrastructure; (2) introducing portable or temporary equipment for venues without sufficient built-in infrastructure. evoke.ca (Gateway Casinos / Match Pub and Eatery, Campbell River) is the identified industry partner. ClearLED transparent LED — theoretically motivated by Berger's reciprocity principle — is an active technology integration thread.
The AI component increases exchange value by reducing the bureaucratic friction between a funder's interest and a matched research project. It translates funder inputs (sector, geography, research focus, investment level) into matched project recommendations and generates a plain-language project brief tailored to the funder's institutional context — not academic jargon.
It also produces a contribution confirmation that documents the exchange in terms legible to the funder's reporting requirements, and generates structured progress updates when Mitacs milestones are reached.
AI as exchange value amplifier in the Benjamin/Flynn framework. The AI layer does not produce the research (cult value) or the published output (exhibition value) — it reduces the transaction cost of placing a price on access to the encounter between funder and practitioner-researcher.
This is a theoretical contribution in itself: AI operating at the exchange value layer rather than at the cult value or exhibition value layers is architecturally distinct from AI as creative or publishing tool. Hold for phd.crooney.ca and ARIES framing.