Vancouver Island is not a remote work location. It is a bounded innovation ecosystem — mappable, legible, and generative precisely because of its geographic constraints. This is the primary field site for applied Location-Based Experience research conducted under the Multimodal Media Lab.
The Vancouver Island field site is not chosen despite its constraints — it is chosen because of them. Geographic boundedness is the research value proposition.
In Beer's Viable System Model, the environment generates the variety that the system must have requisite variety to absorb. Vancouver Island's bounded geography is not a liability — it is a designed research constraint that makes the field site knowable, manageable, and legible to regional funders and hospitality partners.
Campbell River to Vancouver is not a career limitation. It is the corridor that defines the scale of the practice: deep local expertise rather than global ambition — which is a more defensible and more replicable research position.
Christensen's RPV framework — Resources, Processes, Values — applied not to a firm but to a regional experiential economy. Three mutually constitutive layers, each shaping and reproducing the others.
The research corridor is not a commute. It is a structured field site with distinct variety profiles at each end and a research arc running through the middle.
The ferry crossing from Tsawwassen or Horseshoe Bay is not incidental to the research — it is the threshold event that marks entry into a geographically bounded experiential economy. Designing the ferry corridor as an LBE problem is an extension of the field site logic, not a digression from it.
Vancouver Island has two institutional research relationships in the ecosystem. Their ownership lines are different and should not be conflated.
Joel's direct institutional relationship on Vancouver Island — activatable independently for Mitacs applications and applied research partnerships. The primary applied research anchor for the northern corridor. Relevant to lab.crooney.ca projects, Mitacs applications, and the |F|D|S|L| field site work. Campbell River geography makes this the most immediately activated institutional node.
MML's institutional relationship — not Joel's to activate independently. Identified as a curriculum partnership opportunity when Joel joined MML; this connection informed the ARIES certificate curriculum design work. Current partnership status unclear. Hold until MML clarifies. Noted here for ecosystem completeness — do not push independently.
"Regional experiential economies can be designed as cybernetic operating systems."
Vancouver Island is the minimum viable version of this claim in practice. The practitioner-researcher, operating as a solo performer across the Campbell River to Victoria corridor, is simultaneously Doctor Obscurity (studying the variety requirements of the regional ecosystem), Professor Playlist (designing the experiential architecture), and George Crooney (deploying the system in the room and generating the feedback that funds the next R&D cycle).
The autopoietic loop runs at lounge scale. The research question is whether that operating system can be made explicit, replicable, and scalable across the Island's regional economy — and what becomes visible about experience-intensive innovation when you hold both the RPV map (Lens 1) and the |F|D|S|L| intervention (Lens 2) simultaneously.
Christensen's RPV framework applied to the Vancouver Island innovation ecosystem. What resources exist, what processes are legitimate, what values govern the system — and how those three layers reproduce each other autopoietically. The diagnostic before the intervention.
The |F|D|S|L| experience design framework (Food · Drink · Sound · Light) as the intentional design schema tested within the RPV-mapped field site. Not derived from RPV — held in productive dialectical tension with it via Cole's coordinated lenses methodology.
Key lock — RPV maps the ecosystem. |F|D|S|L| is the intervention tested within it. These are two genuinely distinct lenses (Cole 1996). Do not present them as a unified framework.
Two self-reproducing RPV configurations, both internally coherent, operating at opposite ends of the variety spectrum.
Resources: bounded geography,
regional producers, community venues, NIC/CARTI, practitioner embeddedness.
Processes: seasonal rhythms,
owner-operator model, community event format, lounge scale delivery.
Values: community scale as legitimate unit,
place-based authenticity, sustainability over scale, deep local knowledge.
Resources: capital at scale,
spectacle infrastructure, global talent pipelines, UNLV/Black Fire institutional layer.
Processes: destination event format,
convention floor logic, the strip show, the celebrity restaurateur model.
Values: maximum variety as the only
legitimate operating mode, novelty as the primary signal, global ambition as default.
This page establishes the field site. The work itself is distributed across three subdomains — exploratory, formalized, and theoretical.
Van Isle projects at the Study → Explore stage. Situated experiments before formalization. The Doctor Obscurity layer: testing viability of tools, resources, and knowledge within the bounded field site.
lab.crooney.ca →Lab projects that have cleared the RPV threshold and structured as Mitacs Accelerate applications: confirmed partners, HQPs, deliverables, and funding targets. The Professor Playlist layer: designed outputs from the field site's pools.
projects.crooney.ca →The doctoral research hub. Vancouver Island as primary field site for the integrated article thesis. RPV (Lens 1) and |F|D|S|L| (Lens 2) held in productive dialectical tension across four papers via Cole's coordinated lenses methodology.
phd.crooney.ca →