SGSAH is delighted to announce the 2019 Creative Economy Engagement Fellows, four Early Career Researchers who will be undertaking projects that drive and deliver innovations, productivity and social wellbeing across the Heritage sector.

Following a successful bid to the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), SGSAH has appointed four Creative Economy Engagement Fellows (CEEF).

The Fellows will be working in projects with overarching themes of gameful design and digitisation in the Heritage Sector. Eight organisations from across academia and the Heritage Sector are involved, supporting the fellows throughout their research.

2018 saw SGSAH in partnership with three CEEF researchers, Creative Scotland and nine industry-sector partners looking to address the challenges of fragmentation across the Scottish creative economy.

The 2019 projects and researchers involved are as follows:

Framing heritage through play: Gameful design for place-making in urban environments

University of Glasgow and Edinburgh World Heritage

Fellow: DrLaura Harrison

Academic Mentor: Dr Michael Given

This project will investigate the implementation of gameful design practice in a community-focused heritage context and will examine whether game-like experiences have the capacity to deliver and enhance essential characteristics of a dynamic heritage. The Fellow will partner with Edinburgh World Heritage to use gameful design principles and methods to design experimental digital interventions which allow new forms of engagement with heritage at Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. This is an urban burial ground with a history of vandalism and anti-social behaviour, and is viewed as an ‘at-risk’ site (https://ewh.org.uk/project/graveyards/).

Mobilising Cultural Assets through Youth Engagement and Digital Artefacts

Glasgow School of Art and Highlands and Islands Enterprise

Fellow: Dr Marianne McAra

Academic Mentor: Dr Lynn-Sayers McHattie

This Fellowship aims to explore the relationship between design-led innovation and cultural traditions with a focus on engaging with young people to develop contextually located “future heritage”. The project seeks to reimagine “heritage assets” – material manifestations of creative traditions of art, craft, poetry, and music, as well as a broader range of tangible and intangible aesthetic, historic, scientific, social values– as digital artefacts that embody and express cultural assets and support their ongoing innovation as future heritage. Working in partnership with GSA and HIE and in collaboration with cultural heritage organisations, the Fellow will develop the future heritage research agenda through applying a participatory design approach.

Digitisation Strategy for Shetland Museum’s Recognised Textile Collection

University of Glasgow and Shetland Museum and Archives

Fellow: Dr Roslyn Chapman

Academic Mentor: Professor Lynn Abrams

The project’s principal aim is to undertake an empirical investigation to understand the most appropriate approach to digitisation for collections of cultural and living heritage, using the knitted lace collection at SMA as a focal point. By identifying the common standards needed to make rural museum’s cultural collections digitally accessible, it aims to offer a digitisation framework for small collections to enable them to understand their audience’s digital needs in a meaningful way to the benefit of both organisation and audience alike. The project will inform and shape the future direction of collection digitisation for Shetland’s museums and identify key areas of concern for access to objects and historical information in a digital medium. It will explore issues of reproduction and representation of objects, and concerns about open access to the identities of historical and contemporary makers of museum objects in a local heritage context.

Playing in the Archives: Game Development with Aberdeen’s Medieval Records

University of Aberdeen and Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives

Fellow: Dr William Hepburn

Academic Mentor: Dr Jackson Armstrong

This CEEF explores the interaction between archival heritage and gaming technology. The Fellow will investigate how Aberdeen’s UNESCO-designated medieval records can reach new audiences online and world-wide through engagement with the digital sector and the video games industry. The main objective is to build partnerships for follow-on projects with commercial potential, while exploring how games designers access historical information.

First published: 5 February 2019