Digital Tools for Creative Collaboration Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Tools for Creative Collaboration

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

With Covid-19, remote collaboration has become the new standard way of working, teaching and learning. Higher Education Institutions, being confronted with lock-down situations on very short notice, resorted to preexisting digital collaboration tools and service providers majorly coming from the IT oligopoly companies located in the Silicon Valley. Although well-known and used before the lock-down, these are made for productive collaboration and do not cover the needs of the creative sector. Thus, remote creative collaboration, its needs, possible tools and pitfalls, – require investigation and distinct attention.

This is the topic of the Digital Tools for Creative Cooperation Project (DTCC), led by the Ecole supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Etienne (ESADSE), France, in partnership with Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), Tallinn, Estonia, and University of Applied Sciences (HfG), Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Germany, all three partners having successfully collaborated in the past.

The Project will involve students, teachers, technicians, members of the administrative staff of these three HEI and will aim to:
– equip students, teachers and staff of the HEI in art and design with necessary skills and tools, creating future-proof conditions for digital creative cooperation
– through the critical approach, raise awareness on the data treatment challenges, including data security and ecological threats.

In order to achieve these goals, the consortium will:
– Conduct exploratory research on digital practices in art and design HEI
– Develop and test a series of web-based Collaborative Software Prototypes for the creative sector
– Produce the “New pedagogical online-offline realities in art and design” publication
– Create a Toolkit – Online platform and exhibition

Three intensive international workshops, milestones of the project, will be organised in order to engage and involve all the interested participants in the cooperation on the project. Through different stages, the participants will enhance their understanding of the issues linked to the project theme, acquire new technical and language skills, open up to different cultural environments, and grow capable of undertaking new challenging international projects.

Several events will highlight the project results and allow reaching out to the larger audience. Organised at the end of the project, a conference and an exhibition during the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2023, IxDA Seminar in Tallinn or the International Seminar Week (ISW) in Schwäbisch-Gmünd will be perfect occasions to spread and disseminate the project results and share its best practices.

Those will sustain after the end of the project thanks to the strong ties created between the students and the staff of the Partner Organisations. The online platform hosted by the means foreseen by ESADSE after the project will guarantee open access to the materials for the creative area professionals. The findings should be also applicable to other domains where creative processes can be found e.g. engineering, software or research collaborations.

As a result, the project will provide an opportunity to significantly improve teaching quality and possibly create new teaching approaches in the context of art and design. Furthermore, exploring improved creative remote collaboration potentially can open up more intensive and fruitful cooperation between universities, national or international, especially in pandemic times that prevent people from meeting in person.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 288260 Eur

Project Coordinator

CITE DU DESIGN-ECOLE SUPERIEURE D’ART ET DE DESIGN & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd
• Eesti Kunstiakadeemia