Creative Informatics is an ambitious research and development programme based in Edinburgh which aims to bring the city’s world-class creative industries and tech sector together.
Since 2018, it has provided funding and development opportunities to creative individuals and organisations working in Edinburgh and Southeast Scotland that want to develop new products, businesses and experiences using data and data-driven technology.
Across the last five years, Creative Informatics has engaged with almost three thousand businesses and individuals, with 683 benefitting from training and new skills programmes, and 136 SMEs supported to explore data-driven business opportunities. This work has sustained 429 jobs and created 210 new products, services, and experiences, which has in turn generated over £7.5 million in further funding and investment. The programme has also delivered a series of showcase events and activities in collaboration with creative partners and funded participants.
The programme is delivered in partnership across four organisations: the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Codebase and Creative Edinburgh. You can find out more across the people behind Creative Informatics in our Team section.
Creative Informatics is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme; a UK-wide initiative designed to drive innovation, growth, and sustainability in the Creative Industries, through a first-of-its-kind research and development investment of £80 million by the UK government. Creative Informatics is one of nine Creative Industries Clusters around the UK.
The Clusters Programme is managed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Industrial Strategy. Creative Informatics is also funded by, and part of, the Data Driven Innovation initiative of the Edinburgh and Southeast Scotland City Region Deal, with additional funding from the Scottish Funding Council.
Creative Informatics will run until the end of March 2024, with a final celebration of the programme and its achievements taking place with a series of events at the Edinburgh Science Festival, which you can find out more about in our events section.
Take a look at the figures below which give a sense of the scale and breadth of investment and support enabled by the programme.
Funded Activity
The programme offered a variety funding opportunities for individuals and organisations that are looking to do inspiring work with data.
Data, in the context of Creative Informatics, can mean lots of things. Data can be: a museum, gallery, or individual’s archive collections; an organisation’s business data – on customers, ticketing, previous projects; licensed or open data sets about the world – for example environmental data, footfall data, geographic or georeferenced data sets; information in texts, videos, or images – perhaps looking at patterns across collections of documents; a data set as used as the basis for creative work – a sewing patterns that visualise bird watching data.
We have supported partners to understand what creating innovative data driven work means for them, with funding for projects across a variety of different programmes.
Programmes and funding streams included Creative Bridge, Resident Entrepreneurs, and Connected Innovators, plus Challenge and Horizon projects, which have engaged hundreds of participants across the last five years.
