Film and Media Department wins project for Innovation Alliances funded by Erasmus +

Alliances for Innovation aim to strengthen Europe’s innovation capacity by boosting innovation through cooperation and flow of knowledge among higher education, vocational education and training (both initial and continuous), and the broader socio-economic environment, including research.

They also aim to boost the provision of new skills and address skills mismatches by designing and creating new curricula for higher education (HE) and vocational education and training (VET), supporting the development of a sense of initiative and entrepreneurial mind-sets in the EU.

CYANOTYPES is the project that the Film and Media Department will be developing with a wide variety of organisations, stakeholders, and European networks to address the needs and skills gaps in the Cultural & Creative Industries.

Based on innovative multidisciplinary approaches, CYANOTYPES will tackle the sector’s potential for innovation and competitiveness, which deals as well with challenges presented by, among others, COVID-19, the digital transition, and the green shift. The project title references the iron-based photographic process that lead to the term “blueprint” we know today. Inspired by this key moment of innovation, CYANOTYPES sees in this very practice an exemplary episode from the pre-digital archive of arts-and-technology experimentation that inspires creators to this day. Invoking a pre-digital technology, CYANOTYPE cautions that “the digital” is itself in a moment of transition, offering us new possibilities and perspectives. While we anticipate growing roles for AI, Big Data, and synthetic content generated by data-driven systems in the immediate future, we also see the need to imagine multiple futures on which innovation in CCI education depends.

Earlier projects indicated that advancing vocational education programs should follow the guiding principle that the “Community is the Curriculum”, moving on from the idea of a wholly centralised, institutional approach to learning. CYANOTYPES builds anticipation into its methodological framework to empower creators to imagine multiple futures and to make their processes more environmental-friendly, sustainable, resilient, and dynamic. Organised by a triple loop learning framework focused on how we “learn how to learn”, CYANOTYPES’ integrates specific and transversal skill sets organized by key thematic areas to serve as context-specific points for different stakeholder groups. CYANOTYPES provides short- and longer-term strategic interventions and concrete skills development solutions that can be adopted across the European CCI ecosystem.