Creative Technology

Creative technology combines data with art, to improve the working lives of creatives in Scotland and enable them to push their art with modern techniques.

Arts in Edinburgh

Edinburgh is host to a huge number of creative-centred businesses, and home to the Edinburgh College of Art. The creative industries include, amongst others, fashion, photography, architecture and computer game design.

How do Creatives use data?

To run businesses

Data has applications to creative businesses in the following two ways:

  • It allows them to understand their customer-base better by monitoring attendance numbers and ticket-sales and support marketing efforts.
  • It gives them the ability to improve their own internal organisation by improving their book-keeping, budgeting etc.

A core ambition of DDI within Creative Tech is to make art students more fluent with data, to prepare them for the practicalities of marketing their art and running their own busienesses.

To push their art 

Dozens of creative professions, like modern animation and game design, require artists to use data as an accepted part of their daily work. Beyond this, creatives can harness data to produce the most cutting edge art such as:

  • Virtual reality
  • Architectural fly-throughs of buildings
  •  Motion capture

Creative Technology at the University 

The Centre for Design Informatics - design informatics is a fusion of art and science. This initiative is part of a collaboration between the School of Informatics and Edinburgh College of Art, and is adjoined to the Bayes Centre. Research at the Centre covers areas such as blockchain technology, social computing and speech recognition. The Centre offers postgraduate courses in Design Informatics. Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds including computer science and art.

Read more about the CDI

Professor Chris Speed has been very central to the integration of technology with the creative field at the University. Here, he gives his insight into what initiatives are taking place currently:

 

Creative challenges

The CDI hosts a number of 'creative challenges' evey year. Here, they challenge larger businesses to present SMEs with a data-based problem for them to solve.

The CDI Creative Challenges

For jobs in Creative tech, search MyCareerHub.

Read Prospect's overview of the Creative sectors.

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