For a government funded programme that has come to an end, the future for the digital arts creatives it brought together looks bright. The curtain may have closed on Creative Informatics programme, but its legacy – as the launchpad of a cluster of technology curious artists – looks set to endure.
“It was unique from the offset, an experiment, if you like,” enthuses Professor Melissa Terras, director of the programme, hosted by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with CodeBase, the tech accelerator, Edinburgh Napier University and Creative Edinburgh.
“I’m sad that it’s drawn to a close as we did some amazing, inspiring work – and brought together people from such diverse backgrounds. In fact, it created a community where we didn’t have one before.
“It was groundbreaking, in that we had an incredible arts scene in Edinburgh and an incredible tech start-up culture. The programme built a bridge between them both, and that’s going to last.”
The programme, which ran from 2018 to this year, brought together artists, dancers, quilt-makers, designers and an array of craftspeople, helping them get up to speed with digital and platform technologies that could influence, reshape and even dramatically alter their work.
With £10 million in funding over six years, the programme supported disparate and diverse communities across Edinburgh, down to the Borders and up to Fife in what was – for the purposes of the funding scheme – called the Edinburgh and South East Scotland region.
And the results speak for themselves. More than 40 funding calls supported the development of 212 new products, services and experiences, and 47 spin-out companies and 445 jobs were created, all contributing to – according to independent economic analysis carried out in June this year – an estimated gross value added to the Scottish economy of £78.5m.
But the story is richer than financial data. Hundreds of people have been trained in new digital methods, creative teams got legal advice to understand how to design a game which required immersing players into virtual reality environments, some needed assistance with business plans and others sought access to the University of Edinburgh’s supercomputing hub at Easter Bush.
“We helped around 360 projects over the course of the programme, and each one was different,” says Terras. “That was the beauty of it, really, the fact that we had all these energetic people with boundless creativity, seeking to do something new and innovative. The programme’s limits were only ones that we imposed on ourselves.”
Not all of the ideas made it to fully fledged start-up. Some of the start-ups themselves didn’t grow much beyond proof of concept or pilot. But – in common with many other accelerator or start-up support programmes – the point was to give creators the room and space to breathe. However, there have been some notable successes.
“It is a bit like spread betting,” Terras, pictured left, explains. “We were funding lots of different projects in lots of different ways. But I am proud of the fact that we have helped set up nearly 50 businesses, one of them which has gone on to raise a significant sum from venture capital funds.
“And that was a fantastic innovation: it was all about smart fabric, and if you line robot hands with fabric, and use haptics, so that the robots can feel surfaces and textures. That’s a huge development, and they’re now working with the Mars mission.”
The company, Touchlab, is one of the shining examples of the Creative Informatics programmes, and, of course, there have been others. But for Terras it was about not being afraid of trying something new.
“People are allowed to fail in industry in a way that they aren’t in academia,” she says. “Of course, the chances of going on to succeed are slim and if you fund 360 projects you’d expect a long tail.”
As well as helping people acquire the tech skills directly, the programme also acted as a conduit to meeting others with different skillsets, to create branching effects. A bit like Mark Logan – the Scottish Government’s outgoing chief entrepreneur – envisioned in his Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review, with its “market square” concept.
From a community of none, it grew to a vast network of more than 3,500 people – with Creative Informatics team members getting to know them individually and helping to make introductions and new connections.
One of Terras’s proudest moments was overhearing two people in a pottery workshop extolling the virtues of the programme to each other.
“It was really lovely, actually, just hearing these creatives getting so much out of it. One of them was saying about how the events were really great, and that they’d been introduced to tech through it, and so, as the director of the programme, that’s when I knew it was working as intended. We had done something important.”
She adds: “But listening to the community and getting to know their needs was also really important, because it allowed us to constantly refine and adapt the programme, and plan ahead.
“So, we could be running workshops on 3D printing, or adding training courses, just building up the resources that could be used by the practitioners. It was like building the scaffolding that they could climb.”
All of this took place against the backdrop of diminishing funding for the arts, despite the sector employing 2.4 million people worth £126bn to the UK economy, according to Department for Culture, Media and Sport analysis.
It is getting harder to fund the arts, let alone innovation, says Terras and another proud moment was when she got a chance to “have a good rant” about the state of arts funding and the negative impacts of Brexit during the House of Lords Communication and Digital Select Committee’s Creative Future Inquiry.
Despite the continuing fiscal challenges for the sector, she looks back on a programme that was successfully funded through the UK Government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Scottish Funding Council, and other sources, including the University of Edinburgh’s Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) initiative, totalling almost £10m. A further £7.5m was raised through private investment and grants.
For Terras, it is vital that funding sources continue to be made available, especially with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), which she says need to be used positively and responsibly by practitioners, not dominated by powerful tech companies.
“AI is a really important technology, and it’s been with us for a long time,” she adds. “I’m actually on the board of an AI handwriting recognition company, which in this context is used to help digitise and interpret documents from the historical record.
“But I see AI as a tin opener, it’s just another tool. However, it’s an important one that we should be able to use alongside human creativity.
“I fully believe that humans should be in control of that, and we have to be careful that we don’t allow too much power to be concentrated in too few hands.
“So, we’ve got to be considered about generative AI and who gets to extract value from the creative industries; it’s our job to help train and support people in understanding what the tools can do, understanding their limitations and understanding their application.”
Partner Content in association with The University of Edinburgh
