Building a creative community

Photo: Edinburgh Napier University

It is always hard to look back at a long-term programme and try to distil it but, in the case of Creative Informatics, looking back at a programme so fast-moving and agile gives me a wonderful sense of vertigo and astonishment.

Primarily funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Creative Cluster was a major UK investment over six years to encourage economic growth of the creative industries for a city and its regions. I’ve been working on Creative Informatics since 2017 and, as one of the original writers of the proposal that turned into the Creative Cluster, I am incredibly proud of everything we have achieved together.

When, in 2018, we got the fateful call (well, text message) to say that we had been successful in winning funding, I knew we needed to build a community that spanned Edinburgh and its regions and that bridged the technology and creative sectors. If we managed to do that successfully, the community would live on long after any funded period of the grant, and the legacy would be the connections made, the sparks ignited and the creation of a new creativetech social infrastructure that would support the marvellous city of Edinburgh and its institutions, SMEs, freelancers and researchers.

In response to everything we threw at them, this community has been fantastic. Through 40 funding calls and hundreds of events, labs, and socials, we built a network that navigated a pandemic and innovated through a time of economic crisis. Together we grew £10m from four different funders, including the Scottish Funding Council, to an eye-watering £78.5m, creating 212 new products, services and experiences, 47 new spin-outs and 445 new and safeguarded jobs along the way.

We couldn’t have done this without the passion and support of the 2,637 individuals from across the creative industries that were willing to be trained, supported, enabled and integrated into a fast-moving hubbub that, from a distance, seemed to tick along seamlessly. It was as if the city was just waiting for Creative Informatics to come along and now was our time.

My own personal highlights are diverse and plentiful. Being invited to the House of Lords to speak at its Communication and Digital Select Committee’s Creative Future Inquiry, and managing to inject a good rant about how awful Brexit has been for our creative industries. Visiting our pop-up exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland and watching the reactions of some of the 32,000 visitors to the new products and services we had supported. The book-shaped cake to celebrate the launch of our book, Data-Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries. Plus attending a totally unrelated pottery workshop where I overheard a person I had never met before recommending Creative Informatics and its marvellous work to another artist in the creative community.

What we have built is bigger than any individual or institution and its legacy will live on long beyond the project. So, from its inception, community has been at the very heart of Creative Informatics and I owe this community my thanks. I want to thank Professor Chris Speed, the Founding Director, for inviting me to join him on this journey, and for all that he did for the programme before moving on to pastures new in Australia.

I also want to thank every member of the delivery and programme team, directorate and steering board; we have built something special together. Most of all, I want to thank everyone who took up the opportunities we offered and everyone who took part in Creative Informatics activities.

Once we have had the time to have a rest we can look back on this time knowing we came together and achieved something truly wonderful. Our final report captures some of the scale, scope and ambition of Creative Informatics and documents its legacy as, with excitement, we turn our minds to what this fantastic community will do next.

Professor Melissa Terras, Director, Creative Informatics and Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh,28 August 2024

Notes

This blog appears in a slightly different form as the director’s report within the final report of the Edinburgh and South of Scotland Creative Informatics Programme.

 

The Scotland Creative Informatics Programme was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Scottish Funding Council, Data Driven Innovation and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.