April 2015

Philip Schlesinger, Professor in Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow, and Deputy Director of CREATe, reflects on a recent workshop held at the University of Glasgow.

I convened The Lateral Seminar, a one-day workshop, which took place on 16 March 2015, to push forward new thinking on CREATe’s socio-cultural research and to look for potential points of integration of research conducted to date.

CREATe understands law, and in particular copyright law, to be a key condition for cultural production. Current far-reaching change in the digital environment requires us to develop a new framework that permits a more integrated approach to CREATe’s diverse portfolio of work. That’s why we engaged in some lateral thinking.

Contributors on the day were Raymond Boyle (Glasgow), Martin Kretschmer (Glasgow), Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths), Keith Negus (Goldsmiths), Burkhard Schafer (Edinburgh), John Street (UEA) and Robin Williams (Edinburgh).

Stimulated by short talks given by each of the participants, several emergent themes were discussed. In essence, the workshop’s red thread of argument went like this: it is now essential to regroup work deriving from CREATe’s first two years, irrespective of where it has been situated in the original thematic set-up; it is, furthermore, important to inform continuing work as far as possible with a new framework that effects more integration and therefore adds value to what has been done; and finally, there are topics that we can identify now that might inform the next phase of CREATe’s work.

CREATe’s Carolina Bandinelli and Angela McRobbie both from Goldsmiths, University of London summarise some findings from their work exploring how questions of Intellectual Property impact on the professional practices of designers and design teams within the fashion industry.

The Fashion Work Package for CREATe has focused on a number of intersecting questions. What is it like to embark on a small fashion enterprise in recent years? How do young designers actually create their own working environment as part of the process of establishing a name for themselves soon after they have graduated from a degree course? And in this context how do questions of IP and copyright impact on their everyday practice? We also wanted to open out the study to include three cities in Europe, i.e. London, Berlin and Milan, first to get a sense of how different urban environments and creative industry policies affected these small-scale enterprises and second and more significantly to see how in a European context the reality of the economic recession and wide-scale unemployment was pushing young creative graduates to invent careers for themselves. What we report below is an initial summary and comment on the Milan CREATe work.

CREATe Investigator Dr. Daithí Mac Síthigh from University of Newcastle Law School offers his thoughts from attending the recent Designing Smart Cities Conference at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. This account originally featured on Daithí’s Lex Ferenda blog.

The event was organised by CREATe Deputy Director Professor Lilian Edwards – she also came up with the title of this post!

I’m just returning from a fascinating two-day conference on ‘designing smart cities’ at the University of Strathclyde, chaired by Prof. Lilian Edwards (who is responsible for the title of this post) and supported by CREATe, Horizon, and Glasgow City Council.

I particularly enjoyed this event. I have an on-off academic interest in the interactions between law and the city (which brings in geography and architecture) (seen most obviously in my ‘virtual walls’ article), and further personal interests in transportation and in modernist architecture. And, of course, in both domains, “technology”. Glasgow has received Government funding after a competition: see Future City Glasgow, and so was an ideal location.

There are various plans for audio, articles and the like; these are just a few quick first impressions. No offence to those omitted – my note taking varied across the two days, especially in and around my own contributions. (I was there to speak on the sharing economy, which is work at an early stage, and leading me into interesting place – I had a lively lunchtime conversation about English vs London vs Scottish taxi and private hire licensing, on which I could bore for, well, Scotland/London/England…).