Who we are
CCCI is a strategic research centre focusing on interdisciplinary research that engages arts, culture, humanities, science, and technology.
The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) is a strategic research centre, drawing together academics and practitioners, both within Bath Spa University, as well as facing outward, engaging our city, our region, and our world.
Since it was established by Professor Kate Pullinger in 2017, CCCI has served as a focal point for interdisciplinary research that engages arts, culture, humanities, science, and technology. Bath Spa is a small creative university where traditional subjects sit alongside a strong culture of practice. Many of our academics are also practitioners, collaborating with scholars from across multiple disciplines. As a result, CCCI is profoundly engaged with making and makers, writing and writers, painting and pixels, the hand-made and the automated.
Research grants
Since its inception, CCCI has been awarded three large-scale multi-partner research grants. These programmes have enabled multiple colleagues from Bath Spa to participate in cutting-edge collaborative research and this, in turn, has benefitted their ability to teach and innovate in their chosen fields. Since teaching and learning are at the absolute core of everything the university does, this relationship between research and curriculum development is vital.
The South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN), has brought together four south west universities and two cultural organisations across the themes of Immersion, Automation, and Data, enabling cross-disciplinary research and funding a series of creative industries prototypes.
SWCTN received £6.5m of funding from Research England’s Connecting Capabilities Fund. Seven Bath Spa academics were awarded Fellowships worth between £12-15k through this programme, from across theatre, creative writing, visual arts, creative computing, biology, and music, and several academics are working on the prototyping projects SWCTN is supporting.
The Bristol and Bath Creative Research and Development partnership (B+B Creative R+D) has brought together the four universities in Bristol and Bath with Watershed in Bristol to fund research into new technologies and the creative industries.
This Arts and Humanities Research Council £7.5m programme is enabling research and prototyping on the themes of Digital Placemaking, Expanded Performance, and Amplified Publishing. Bath Spa academics are engaged across this programme, including leading on the development and roll-out of the Amplified Publishing programme.
This £30m UKRI-funded Strength in Places programme brings together the same partners as B+B Creative R+D alongside global and local technology companies and distribution platforms.
This programme will enable academic researchers who lead on new forms of narrative, computer vision, motion capture, AI and understanding audiences, to work with the screen and games industries to maximise our visual media research and production capabilities across the region.
This project will engage our film, tv, and media studios and students, as well as academics in a series of experimental productions as well as industry-focused training.
CCCI's impact
One thing these three large-scale projects have in common is that they bring together industry and academia in a manner that ensures that the research taking place within universities can make a difference in the wider world. Historically this has been called 'Technology Transfer', 'Knowledge Transfer', and more recently 'Knowledge Exchange'. The team behind SWCTN has co-written a set of Knowledge Exchange principles whose key message is: ‘If knowledge is power, then knowledge exchange is sharing power.’
These projects have a strong commitment to inclusion and diversity, providing research fellowships to a broad range of non-academic participants, enabling our academics to work on industry-focussed shared research interests and technology-led prototyping projects.
CCCI works to support Bath Spa colleagues in a number of other ways, including funding multiple fellowships and PhDs, providing funding for events, supporting the development of research bids and running symposia and lectures.
Creative enterprise is also one of our core principles; the success of these research grants has enabled Bath Spa University to open its first town centre innovation hub, The Studio at Palace Yard Mews, where we offer space to researchers and innovators in the creative technology sector.
CCCI is here to foster creative cross-disciplinary conversations, based on the principle that shared research leads to new research, and new research leads to better, more engaging, teaching and learning.