Funded by EPSRC, Joint RCUK Digital Economies cluster grant. PI: Steve Benford (Nottingham); CIs: Foster (Sheffield), Woolford (Lancaster).
Funding: £210,363; direct allocation £31,212.
Holding entry: images, video and full description to add.
CREATOR: New Research Processes and Business Models for the Creative Industries was an EPSRC research cluster under the joint RCUK Digital Economy programme (EP/G002088/1). It was led by Steve Benford in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, with co-investigators including Kirk Woolford, then at Lancaster University. It ran from April 2008 to March 2009.
The cluster asked how new social, pervasive and emotionally responsive technologies would change the creative industries, and what long-term ICT research those industries would need. It also took on a structural problem. Creative businesses tend to work in small teams that form for a single project and then disperse, which makes them hard to involve in traditional long-term research. CREATOR looked at how to engage these businesses, and how to build practice-led research across computing, the arts and humanities, the social sciences and business studies.
The year-long programme had four strands. Open events, ateliers and sandpits built a community of researchers and users and generated seed proposals; at the outset the cluster had 21 partners. Four short practice projects in music, pervasive media and animation tried out new ways of working. Two “troubadour” studies reviewed past and current approaches to research and knowledge transfer. A small team then drew the results together into a research framework, combining a forward-looking agenda with guidelines for new models of collaboration.
The intended outcomes were a research community, seed proposals to EPSRC, the Technology Strategy Board and other Digital Economy funders, and a long-term ICT research agenda for the creative industries.
Source: UKRI Gateway to Research, grant EP/G002088/1. Kirk Woolford on Gateway to Research
