Public discourse on ways in which sustainable business models can counteract climate change and environmental degradation do not normally focus on culture or creative industries as a site for change or as a vehicle for devising and sharing innovative practices. On the contrary, the humanities typically critique the “satanic mills” of industrial development and the destruction of nature and communities in their wake, providing a robust counterpoint to the prima facie acceptance of growth as an inherent good so often found in other disciplines. In this context, data driven innovation (DDI) has often had negative consequences – e.g. data driven fashion trend prediction can accelerate “fast fashion”, blockchain based digital art can have a significant carbon footprint, and inequalities of opportunity and access can be reproduced and even exacerbated through automated decision systems that increasingly pervade every aspect of life. DDI, however, can also empower creatives to reflect, improve and rethink their own creative practices in order to support better decision making through better data collection, collaboration and sharing of good practice. In this panel discussion we explore how DDI can support a sustainable creative economy using case studies and research from the Creative Informatics programme in Edinburgh and Southeast of Scotland region. How can DDI be used to support sustainability for creative practice, with creative practice, and what might this tell us about creative practice? What data is needed to support this? Which technologies are helping creatives to support sustainable creative practices? The ’pivot to digital’ seen across many industries was in many cases accelerated by the global pandemic, but case studies demonstrate that creative practitioners were even before this already producing an alternative future for and through the creative economy. This alternative future is being achieved through circular, green and sustainable forms of production and creation, and through alternative models of distribution with a more automated, data-driven, and audience-led landscape for funding and paying for creative work. The panel will consider all these aspects with reference to social and environmental sustainability within an economy of care model. 

Panellists: Jennie Jordan, Inge Panneels, Susan Lechelt, Chris Elsden  

Moderator Vikki Jones, Edinburgh University 

Dr. Jennie Jordan is Resa researcher and consultant with expertise in business management, policy and evaluation within the creative, cultural and community sectors.

She has worked internationally in the higher education sector teaching and researching creative industries and festival entrepreneurship and leadership, and cultural policy. Her research interests focus on arts and festivals as influential institutions within cultural policy and on questions of cultural inclusion and creative ecosystems. She has published on festivalisation, festivals in urban policy and the business of festival management.

She is a research fellow at the Creative Research and Innovation Centre at Loughborough University London.

Dr. Susan Lechelt is a Lecturer in Design Informatics. Her work is in the domains of human-computer interaction and interaction design and ties together the themes of data literacy, creativity, playfulness, sustainability, and responsible innovation. Her research is concerned with understanding and augmenting people’s perceptions and uses of data-driven technologies. She designs interventions, tools and prototypes to promote discussion and reflection about the role of new technologies in our lives and to empower non-experts to create with new technologies. Previously, these have ranged from playful physical interfaces that teach children fundamental computing concepts through dance, to illustrated card decks aimed to inspire creative practitioners to experiment with new data-driven methods. 

Dr. Inge Panneels, artist and Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, Creative Informatics, is looking at how data and technology is deployed, or missing, to help the creative industries embrace the quintuple bottom line (people, planet, profit, purpose, place), and the role creativity can play to implement a culture shift towards a circular economy which operates within social and ecological boundaries. She is also a current Trustee of Edinburgh Tool Library and Creative Coathanger, she was Senior Lecturer at the Artist Designer Maker course, University of Sunderland; Crafts Advocate for Creative Arts Business Network (CABN) and Specialist Advisor for Creative Scotland and Scottish Arts Council. 

Dr Chris Elsden is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Service Design in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is a design researcher, with a background in sociology, and expertise in the human experience of data-driven services. Using and developing innovative design research methods, his work undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools, FinTech and blockchain technologies. In so doing, he hopes to reveal the many nuanced relationships people and organisations have with digital technology in their everyday lives, and use these insights to identify new and future opportunities for design. Working with charities, theatres and festival organisations, his most recent research explores ‘creative transactions’ – examining how new financial and data-driven technologies change the way creative work is valued and paid for.  

Vikki Jones is an arts and humanities researcher, currently based in Creative Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the communication of value and values in the arts and creative industries. It considers the extent to which value and values are foregrounded in cultural programmes and asks what a values-driven and equitable cultural landscape would look and feel like for artists, creatives, producers, and audiences. Her work explores the developing language and contexts of data-driven cultural outputs. It considers the relationship and tensions between creativity and digital platforms; the challenges and labour of conducting digital research and evaluation; and ways in which the data enacted by, through and for cultural work and programmes might be critically operationalised towards equitable cultural infrastructure.