CREATIVE VOUCHER SCHEME

The Creative Voucher scheme enabled small and medium sized businesses to partner with an arts & humanities-based researcher from one of Creativeworks London’s partner institutions. This section shows all of the projects that we have supported. More information about the scheme can be found here.

Creative Voucher Scheme

Minified Ltd and London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London

SME Partner

Basil Safwat, Minified Ltd

Academic Partner

Professor Sandy Black, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London

Project Title

Towards a knowledge landscape of the fashion and textile industry

Project Description

Towards a knowledge landscape of the fashion and textile industry is a project that aimed to collect a series of qualitative and quantitative data about the fashion and textile industry through workshops and online data collection. The aim was then to present and visualise this information online in a way that would help provide a more complete picture of the complex networks involved in the industry. This project built upon an initial, successful small mapping project with FIREup after which it was realised that there would be significant value to both parties if the collaboration continued and   expanded the concept, developing a methodology that would enable research and mapping of a broader industry network.

One unusual and valuable point about this project was the ability of the participants  to be involved with the design and development of the data­ gathering methodologies rather than the develops being presented with a set of pre-existing data and are asked to turn in into visualisations. Alternatively, an academic institution might collect a set of data that needed detailed analysis before it could be visualised and presented and then have to trawl through it and turn it into useful visualisations and presentations. This project sought to challenge these processes, prototyping the kinds of data presentation the participants wanted, then building the presentations to be wired directly to the data source.

Two workshops were held during the project, each focused on a different theme. The workshops were used to collect qualitative data for the project, and as an opportunity to show WIP/prototype visualisations, to get feedback about their usefulness and legibility from the industry which enabled improvements to be made to the visualisations before finalising the online questionnaire.

The project participants built a set of connectors between a standard online survey tools (such as you might get online after making a purchase) and wired this up to their custom visualisations. This meant that the academics could use an existing online research tool to create questionnaires, and view raw data, while wired to the visualisations in real time, meaning that the public facing visualisations would always be up to date.  The key output of this project was integrated into the main platform as a research tool and source of live information which will have many applications moving forward.

An in-progress version of the project was exhibited at a sustainable fashion and textiles expo.

 

Queen Mary - University of London
Arts & Humanities Research Council
European Union
London Fusion

Creativeworks London is one of four Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to develop strategic partnerships with creative businesses and cultural organisations, to strengthen and diversify their collaborative research activities and increase the number of arts and humanities researchers actively engaged in research-based knowledge exchange.