Volunteer brings those bones to life

by Beth Bohnert, reused by permission from the UW alumni e-newsletter

There are wonders everywhere you turn in Waterloo's Earth Sciences Museum. Here, you can peer through an amethyst tunnel. There, the massive Watrock, a huge obelisk of stone, thrusts up from the basement to the second floor. And of course, there are dinosaurs.

Here and there, you also find posters. With a few lines of text and some carefully chosen photos, they illuminate the subjects around you, from gemstones to groundwater, trilobites to T. Rex.

John Motz, a 2000 PhD graduate, is a volunteer with the museum and the creative force behind the posters. Using skills developed as both a geologist and journalist, he provides information and explanation for what might otherwise be just so many sparkling rocks or old bones.

"John's posters piece together the stories behind the specimens. He brings them to life," says Peter Russell, the museum's long-time curator.

Dinosaurs have captivated Motz since childhood. And though he began his studies at Waterloo in chemistry, the creatures of the past continued to lure him. "I noticed that most of my friends were geologists," he says, "and what they were doing was more interesting that what I was doing. I was drawn to the lab work."

He transferred from chemistry to geology, but his doctoral research combined elements of both disciplines. He demonstrated how hydrogen and oxygen isotopes that occur in the exoskeletons of fossil insects hold clues to the environments in which these ancient creatures lived.

In 2004, after selling the business he owned with his brother, John found himself semi-retired. He began volunteering at the museum in the same year. Aside from geology, he also has a background in journalism — his family owned the Waterloo Region Record and at one point, he was news editor for the Cambridge Times. The posters became a way "to use my skills and give something back at the same time. Putting them together is educational, it's creative, and it's fun," he says.

Today, he spends one day a week at the museum, creating posters and cataloguing the collection's 3,000 specimens. He also helped re-construct the skeleton of a massive cave bear. It looms over the Paleo Pit, where visitors gather for the museum's ever-popular dinosaur presentations, and will be getting a new display case next week through the efforts of Motz and Russell.

Not all of Motz’s volunteer efforts occur behind the scenes. He recently joined Russell and professor Paul Karrow as they hunted for the original excavation site of the Highgate Mastodon, unearthed near Ridgetown, Ontario in 1890. Their search drew attention from the media and the public. Motz isn't surprised: "Everyone likes mammoths and mastodons," he says. "They're such big, ugly, hairy things." Perhaps that's why, of all the posters he's created, his personal favourite is the one that traces this mammoth mystery: how the most complete Ontario mastodon skeleton ever found wound up, a century after its discovery, in a North Dakota museum.

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Logo feedback this fall, alumni told

Highlights of an article that appeared last week in UW’s e-newsletter for alumni

Depending on who you talk to, it's "dynamic", "creative" and "unique", or "ugly", "amateurish" and "an insult to the people who started the university."

"It" is the prototype of a new university logo, leaked to the public last month. The image — a bold, black W splashed with multi-coloured strokes — has sparked letters to the editor, ignited both an anti-logo Facebook group and a pro-logo group, and generated elaborate parodies and alternate designs.

The disputed logo is part of a new visual identity program that would create design "architecture" for the university's print materials, web design, and even signage. By using certain elements consistently, like the black sans-serif font, the different pieces begin to fit together visually. You can see that all those faculties, schools, centres and units are actually part of a whole.

But there's still room for variety. Each faculty has chosen a colour that they'll be identified by; the professional schools are using red and university-wide student services are using gold. You can see these eight colours in the lines that criss-cross the logo's W.

The lines themselves represent motion, because in the research conducted prior to developing the identity program, people familiar with Waterloo described it as a place of action, where people are "going places", "making a difference", "ambitious" and "connected."

All of Waterloo's activities are guided by the Sixth Decade Plan, which outlines ambitious goals that will enable the university to compete at the global level. But despite Waterloo's impressive showings year after year in university rankings by Maclean's and The Globe & Mail, it seems many people don't realize we're even in the arena. In a summer 2008 Ipsos Reid survey that tested Canadians' awareness of their universities, Waterloo ranked ... tenth.

Tenth? We're the school that wrote the book on co-op. The home of the world's first free-standing math faculty. We helped spawn the BlackBerry, for Pete's sake. Clearly, the Waterloo message is not getting out.

A new logo won't earn Waterloo the recognition it so richly deserves (although with the logo controversy going viral, we've certainly caught the media's attention). But the logo is just one part of a much bigger picture, explains Meg Beckel, vice-president, external relations and leader of the identity task force. In a presentation now posted on the university's Facebook site, Meg outlines the lengthy research process, begun in early 2008, used to identify our key attributes, the things that differentiate us from Queen’s, Western or the London School of Economics, for that matter. This process, called positioning, is a vital step in differentiating ourselves from other universities.

The university's Executive Council approved the positioning framework late last fall. Our graphics team then went to work, using those attributes — our willingness to be unconventional, our innovative streak, our creativity, among others — as the basis for a visual identity that, as Meg puts it, "tells our story."

Judging by their comments, most people seem to agree that these attributes — unconventional, creative, collaborative, connected, innovative, risk-taking — do indeed reflect the Waterloo they know. Students and alumni alike have commented that this work is a necessary step toward more effectively presenting Waterloo to the world. But many just don't like this logo.

"What we are hearing," Meg says, "is that the design does not convey a classic and professional and conservative 'look'. Therein lies our challenge. We are trying to convey something quite different . . . trying to convey unconventional, creative, risk-taking."

This fall, students, alumni and other stakeholders will have the chance to give their feedback on the resulting visual identity system. "We [will] build all perspectives into our consultation process," Meg notes. "If we find we have a major disconnect between the attributes we wish to convey and the attributes the logo seems to convey, we will give ourselves more time. If, however, we find there is resistance to the attributes themselves and the direction of the Sixth Decade Plan ... well, that is a very different conversation."

CAR

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