Stella’s on Portage: Downtown Winnipeg’s cozy café where creativity, conversation, and community come together.
How Stella’s on Portage Fuels Winnipeg’s Creative Experiments
Some of our most fun and exciting work in storytelling, AI, and community creativity doesn’t happen in a lab, on campus or at the gallery; it often happens over lattes, conversation and breakfasts at Stella’s on Portage. For the artists, youth, and researchers involved with our projects, Stella’s isn’t just a café. It’s a buzzing workspace, an impromptu think tank, and sometimes the unofficial headquarters for our many micro-experiments in narrative, simulation, and social imagination.
Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
A collection of story outputs from the Unfinished Tales and Short Stories project, with music composed by youth artist Tony Eetak. Youth learned to develop AI tools to support storytelling and digital literacy. Coffee and cafe settings are present in many of the almost 7 million words of short story experiments in the program’s datasets.
Coffee-Fueled Experiments
Often sitting at a corner table, our group studies people as much as they sip their coffee. Observing gestures, overhearing conversations, noticing fleeting interactions. These often become sparks for new stories, new prompts for AI-assisted simulations, and inspiration for playful experiments in narrative design. For us, the café is, in effect, a real-world sandbox, where the chaos of everyday life downtown feeds the creative process.
While some might think serious arts and research requires studios, labs or code-heavy workstations, we thrive on improvisation. A short story drafted on a napkin might become the basis for an AI-generated simulation. A conversation about a passerby’s unusual hat might inspire a digital narrative. This downtown café setting encourages curiosity, serendipity, and low-pressure prototyping, qualities we’ve found invaluable when exploring how AI can co-create alongside humans.
From Observation to Creation
This rhythm—observe, experiment, iterate—has taught us something so important: storytelling is as much about attention as intention. Immersing ourselves in everyday life and letting ideas percolate in informal spaces, we can explore designing AI tools and narrative structures that are responsive, surprising, and culturally grounded. So for us, Stella’s isn’t just a meeting place; it’s a laboratory for curiosity, a hub where ordinary moments transform into extraordinary creative experiments.
And as much as it’s about research, Stella’s is also about community. Everyone, from students to Elders to visiting artists feels welcome to linger, talk, and contribute. It’s a reminder that creativity isn’t always a solo pursuit; sometimes, it’s a shared experience, unfolding over the clink of coffee cups and the hum of conversation.
Our favorite café is proof that the best ideas often start in the simplest places.
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