We’re delighted to introduce our Round 5 Resident Entrepreneurs, who will receive £12,000 of funding along with mentoring and support from the Creative Informatics team to develop innovative new products and services using data!

Jeni Allison

Jeni Allison is a knitwear brand based in Edinburgh, prioritising digital design and simulation technologies to make the product development process as accurate, sustainable and visual as possible. The brand is a celebration of Scottish knit innovation with its first products launching in September 2021. Jeni also works freelance designing and developing knitwear for manufacturers, arts organisations and brands, as well as being a design educator. She works part time as a knit technician at Glasgow School of Art and is s currently working on an education programme with Craft Scotland exploring teaching STEM through contemporary textiles.

Jeni’s Resident Entrepreneur project is focused on building a web-based application to facilitate affordable, bespoke knit customisation.

Jeni said: “I plan to develop a dual purpose web app with a canvas component. The web app will have a hidden, back end side, for me to develop jacquard patterns and a front facing app for customers to design their own knitted patterns. Each pixel on the web app will represent a knitted stitch. Knitting machines have stated ‘rules’ which need to be followed to produce knitted garments, by defining guardrails which both adhere to the rules of my knitting machines (colours per row, length of floats etc) and adhere to my brand’s aesthetic, I will be able to offer customers the opportunity to ‘design’ their own knits with predefined interchangeable and moveable elements.”

Jeni was a global finalist in the Woolmark Performance Challenge 2018 in association with Adidas.

Amicable Animal

Amicable Animal is the moniker of Edinburgh-based university lecturer and indie developer Tom Methven. Originally formed as a creative outlet for his obsessions with time, neon and synthwave, it quickly mutated into a way of collaborating with other talented creators to make strange and interesting games that respect players’ intelligence.

In January 2021, Amicable Animal released its first commercial game on Steam and Switch: SOLAS 128, a game of interconnected puzzles where players redirect and reconfigure rhythmic pulses of light to breathe life back into an ancient machine. Almost entirely wordless, and with a focus on accessibility, SOLAS 128 has received both critical and player acclaim for its fully interconnected world, expertly paced introduction of mechanics, and puzzle design.

For his Resident Entrepreneur project, Tom will be focussing on an new project prototype called Fabricate Reality.

Tom said: “Fabricate Reality is a game where the player takes the role of a newly self-aware AI who seeks to learn more about humanity, and what it means to be human. Players will be tasked with overseeing the construction of a virtual base, the programming of the autonomous agents within it, and creating production lines to capture, clean, and process data using simplified versions of real-world data science techniques. This is a hugely ambitious project for a solo developer, so Creative Informatics’ support is invaluable in making this a reality, and allows for in-depth collaboration with Luci Holland, a local professional freelance composer and musician.”

SOLAS 128 was a finalist for the UKIE’s UK Game of the Show event 2021, an Official Selection at Strasbourg, and an Indie Dev World Order (puzzle) winner. Since release, it has garnered an 82 Generally Favourable score on Metacritic, and is currently sitting at a 100% Very Positive rating on Steam. Watch the SOLAS 128 trailer.

Jules Horne

Jules Horne is a writer and publisher from the Scottish Borders. Her writing includes stage and radio plays, spoken word, film, museums interpretation and song lyrics, and is inspired by the life and languages of her native region. Her work often plays with scale and layers of epic and closeup storytelling. Her site-specific plays ‘Allotment’ and ‘Thread’ (dir. Kate Nelson) have won Edinburgh Fringe Firsts, and she is under commission to the Lyceum Theatre for a play about women’s rugby.

Radio plays include ‘Macmillan’s Marvellous Motion Machine’ (dir. Rosie Kellagher) for Radio 4, about the Scottish inventor of the bicycle. Jules was a lead artist on the arts-science collaboration ‘Working the Tweed’ for Year of Natural Scotland and her film ‘Unconformity’, about Borders geology, was recently screened at Alchemy Film Festival. As a rural entrepreneur, she publishes her own books and audiobooks and is exploring ways writers can work with technology to expand performance.

Jules is our Marchmont House Resident Entrepreneur, in addition to funding and support from Creative Informatics, she will also complete a two week residency at Marchmont House later this year. Jules’ RE project will focus on developing creative IP to transition from services to products, for a more sustainable writer livelihood. 

Jules said : “As a Resident Entrepreneur at Marchmont House, I will be focusing on storytelling around places specific to the Borders, and using data-driven approaches and Creative Informatics resources to inform creative product development. I am particularly interested in verbatim text and audio, text data and data visualisation, and how voices might be brought together to evoke place and people at scale. I don’t yet know what is technically possible and will be discussing options and getting up to speed with the Creative Informatics team.”

Caro Overy

Caro Overy is a musician and sustainability professional. She leads community choirs, facilitates community music projects and collaborates with other musicians as a vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. In Caro’s environmental work, she builds on her professional background in Higher Education Sustainability, supporting cultural organisations and artists with practical responses to the climate emergency both in her role with Creative Carbon Scotland and with her current development project, Climate Friendly Culture.

Caro was selected as one of our Round 1 Connected Innovators and has now secured funding as a Creative Informatics Resident Entrepreneur. Her Resident Entrepreneur project will focus on developing a plan for a tool to support creative practice in collaboration with Creative Carbon Scotland and InGenerator.

Caro Said: “This new tool will enable individual artists and a diverse range of cultural organisations to understand their environmental impact and utilise the unique influential capacity that we have in the cultural sector to contribute to the wider change our society needs to address the climate emergency.” 

“Further to my work on development project Climate Friendly Culture that was supported through the Connected Innovator programme, I’ll be building on initial concept sketches and carrying out user testing on visual prototypes for the tool and aim to develop a plan for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Alongside this funded support, I’m also a member of the current Creative Bridge cohort where I’m learning from guest speakers and my peers about digital product development.”

Visible Ink Television

Visible Ink are creators and aim to be producers of fantasy live television series for national and international markets. Their previous broadcast one-offs and series are in drama, documentary, comedy, children’s TV and dance for Sci Fi Channel, Discovery Channel, Children’s Channel and ARD in Germany.

Visible Ink is led by cameraman, writer, director, producer, creative entrepreneur and Founder Martin Fisher. Drawing on their live action and animation expertise, Visible Ink are working to develop MoPaCT, a performance capture and precise positioning system that allows ‘animation into live’ integration. Their Resident Entrepreneur project will focus on development of the MoPaCT MVP, creating an innovative tool that can be used in Visible Ink’s own work and marketed as a new, much needed product for the Film and TV industry.

Martin said: “MoPaCT is currently patented in USA, GB with EU to follow. From the initial feasibility study and through a process of constant development we are moving forward to building the initial MVP, which will be used to excite further investment and potential customers. MoPaCT’s precise positioning and perspectives are derived from a single or multiple high-end production camera(s), which can be positioned anywhere – in a studio, on location or even underwater.”

“With our established network of expertise we are looking forward to moving towards realising this exciting integration technology product. We are fortunate to be supported and encouraged by high level know-how and internationally famous names from the worlds of children’s TV, situation comedy, Scifi and dance and of course the fantastic Creative Informatics team.”

You can find out more about all our current Resident Entrepreneurs over on our Community Page. Applications for our next round of Resident Entrepreneurs open on Monday 18th of October. If you are interested in applying, please contact our team at creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk.