The vast majority of cultural organisations face significant barriers in transitioning towards networked, online cultural and business models. We call this the 'New Real.' New literacies and skills are needed to develop and delight online audiences while negotiating the profound, complex challenges surrounding safety, privacy, transparency, and misinformation in networked environments. Being able to critically reason about the function of a system makes us more resilient in the face of future system failures, or can help us to make judgements about whether systems are safe and ethical. Our project responds directly to this need. Qualitative research through participatory design and ethnographic methodology will investigate the potential for strategies from data arts to be tailored and situated for organisations newly producing online experiences. It will specifically address the design of online and hybrid experiences to both delight audiences and develop critical literacies around the underlying tensions and moral dilemmas in the New Real. Aim: to better understand how to facilitate and accelerate the transition to resilience through new cultural, social and economic models for the UK's world leading cultural sector. This is supported by three concrete Objectives (O), each corresponding to a work-package (WP) and research question (RQ): O1: Understand the strategies used by data arts practitioners and organisations to delight audiences and build critical literacies in the New Real. O2: Co-design pathways with cultural organisations towards new forms of pandemic-resilient online and hybrid experiences. O3: Synthesise a set of actionable insights, tools, concepts and models that can enable and support post-COVID19 recovery.

Over the last decade, the creative industries have been revolutionised by the Internet and the digital economy. The UK, already punching above its weight in the global cultural market, stands at a pivotal moment where it is well placed to build a cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure in which first movers as significant as Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes may emerge and flourish, driving new jobs and industry. However, for some creators and rightsholders the transition from analogue to digital has been as problematic as it has been promising. Cultural heritage institutions are also struggling to capitalise upon new revenue streams that digitisation appears to offer, while maintaining their traditional roles. Policymakers are hampered by a lack of consensus across stakeholders and confused by partisan evidence lacking robust foundations. Research in conjunction with industry is needed to address these problems and provide support for legislators. CREATe will tackle this regulatory and business crisis, helping the UK creative industry and arts sectors survive, grow and become global innovation pioneers, with an ambitious programme of research delivered by an interdisciplinary team (law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis) across 7 universities. CREATe aims to act as an honest broker, using open and transparent methods throughout to provide robust evidence for policymakers and legislators which can benefit all stakeholders. CREATe will do this by: - focussing on studying and collaborating with SMEs and individual creators as the incubators of innovation; - identifying "good, bad and emergent business models": which business models can survive the transition to the digital?, which cannot?, and which new models can succeed and scale to drive growth and jobs in the creative economy, as well as supporting the public sector in times of recession?; - examining empirically how far copyright in its current form really does incentivise or reward creative work, especially at the SME/micro level, as well as how far innovation may come from "open" business models and the "informal economy"; - monitoring copyright reform initiatives in Europe, at WIPO and other international fora to assess how they impact on the UK and on our work; - using technology as a solution not a problem: by creating pioneering platforms and tools to aid creators and users, using open standards and released under open licences; - examining how to increase and derive revenues from the user contribution to the creative economy in an era of social media, mash-up, data mining and "prosumers"; - assessing the role of online intermediaries such as ISPs, social networks and mobile operators to see if they encourage or discourage the production and distribution of cultural goods, and what role they should play in enforcing copyright. Given the important governing role of these bodies should they be subject to regulation like public bodies, and if so, how?; - consider throughout this work how the public interest and human rights, such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge for the socially or physically excluded, may be affected either positively or negatively by new business models and new ways to enforce copyright. To investigate these issues our work will be arranged into seven themes: SMEs and good, bad and emergent business models; Open business models; Regulation and enforcement; Creators and creative practice; Online intermediaries and physical and virtual platforms; User creation, behaviour and norms; and, Human rights and the public interest. Our deliverables across these themes will be drawn together to inform a Research Blueprint for the UK Creative Economy to be launched in October 2016.