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.
The project aimed to study and develop a teaching culture of digital practices in the field of creative practices, to feed research in this field, to create open source and/or free license tools, adapted to the creative context and whose data are hosted in the EU. Within the framework of the European cooperation between three art and design HEI, the objective was to study the uses, the working methodologies, to define the parameters of creative digital tools. The objectives of the project were: - to equip students, teachers and staff of art and design colleges with the necessary skills and tools, thus creating conditions for digital creative cooperation; - through the critical approach, to raise awareness of the challenges of data processing, including data security and ecological challenges, among the target audiences.
With Covid-19, remote collaboration has become "the new normal", the new norm for working, teaching and learning. Institutions of higher education, faced with sudden lock down situations, have resorted to pre-existing digital collaboration tools provided primarily by oligopolistic Silicon Valley IT companies. Although well known and used prior to the lockdown, these tools are created for productive collaboration and do not entirely meet the needs of the creative sector, one of the most heavily impacted by the health crisis. Thus, remote creative collaboration - its needs, its possible pitfalls, - requires special exploration and attention. Following the exceptional call from the Erasmus + Programme in 2020, Esadse has built a project to meet these needs with its partners EKA and HfG, convinced of the quality of this partnership since the previous collaborations. The European dimension and the outreach to the professional design community have been ensured thanks to the participation of the Bureau of European Design Associations (BEDA).