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Faculty of Arts

Digital Arts and Humanities Mission and Strategy

What's our goal?

For the Warwick Arts Faculty and the Faculty of Arts Building to be producing world-class digitally enhanced activities for:

  • Research
  • Teaching & Learning
  • Careers & Enterprise
  • Alumni Engagement
  • Public Engagement
  • Creative Arts
  • Lifelong Learning

It will be a thriving community, rich in opportunities and resources. A place where everyone knows they can achieve great results, with impact, reaching audiences locally, nationally and internationally. A powerful catalyst for innovation, knowledge development, learning, and personal growth.

Students and staff from all Arts departments, as well as interdiciplinary partners, alumni, industry, and the public, will work together, using the best tools and techniques, to create professional quality results. For each of the areas of activity, we will have a repertoire of well-designed, supported and researched strategies, templates and examples to feed creativity (building on Digital Arts Lab work). For example, in teaching and learning, pedagogic strategies such as problem-based learning, lifelong learning, public engagement pedagogy, will be well understood, supported and widely practiced. For teaching and learning, we will develop inter-disciplinary communities of practice to research, develop and support key pedagogic strategies, facilitated by pedagogy champions.

For technology-related areas, we will support friendly and welcoming technology clubs (modelled on the existing Warwick VR Club), with access to training (at all levels) and opportunities to play with tools in sandbox spaces. This will include film making, graphic design, web development and programming.

We will actively facilitate the showcasing of work, so as to inspire and demonstrate what is possible, helping people define their own goals and projects. Support will then be provided from experts (e.g. Learning Design Consultancy Unit) and the community for people to develop and adopt new practices, blueprinting, building and operating their designs. Our Design Change undergraduate modules will develop a community of students who are able to help, and even lead, these projects (for any of the areas of activity listed above).

There will be excellenct facilities and support for producing key types of output, including:

  • Courses
  • Learning activities
  • Events
  • Publications
  • Performances
  • Exhibitions
  • Collaborations
  • Apps
  • Games
  • Websites
  • Videos
  • Digital images and visualisations
  • Gadgets
  • VR & AR experiences

Our "platform" of tools, spaces, support and services will be continually reviewed for relevance and quality by a formal platform management process (working with IDG and Academic Technology). There will be clear channels through which staff and students may communicate gaps and identify emerging requirements. There will be support for people making cases for changes and additions to the platform. We will continually scan for and review new and future technology developments.

There will be done in a caring and inclusive way. We recognise that not everyone is, or should be, a digital-specialist with advanced technical skills. Success in these activities requires a range of skills and knowledge working together: academic expertise, technical expertise, design expertise etc. We need to provide people with opportunities to deepen and broaden their capabilities, but also to form collaborations that combine people with a range of expertise. Effective organisations facilitate personal development and collaboration. They have depth and breadth. We will provide/source appropriate training and development opportunities, and facilitate networking opportuniites and spaces.

Our collaborations will develop and apply ideas and approaches from our Arts and Humanities disciplines to do things in a distinctively "Warwick Arts" way. In return, our academic disciplines will be enriched with fresh ideas, practices and opportunities. Central to this is openness. Digital technologies and the new building will make it much easier for us to involve previously disconnected communities (including our alumni). We will take a more holistic approach to designing the student experience, in which areas of activity (e.g. research, teaching & public engagement) are brought together seamlessly.

We will create a sense of community and shared purpose, within the building and through our local and global networks.

We will achieve global recognition as a centre of excellence in Digital Arts and Humanities, including pedagogy. An active research programme will build this reputation, through communities of practice, pedagogy champions, and the Designing Change student community.

Example 1

Professor Smith has been working with an alumnus to develop practice and research concerning the use of virtual reality for community building projects in economically deprived areas. This draws upon our communities of practice for experiental learning and public engagement pedagogy, as well as our VR Club and its facilities. They develop a module together, in which students design, build, and test VR experiences with the public. This brings together theatre, film, and history. A conference and a series of publications results from the collaboration, with participants from similar communities around the world joining in virtually.

Example 2

A group of students from Classics work with local schools to provide taster sessions, creating and exploring digitized artefacts and the stories that they can reveal. This draws upon our digital humanities and visualisation expertise and facilities. This works well, and through our international networks they contact similar researchers and schools around the country and internationally. They then develop an online course for educators, so that they can use the digized artefacts independently. This leads to a research publication in which they describe and evaluate their work.

Example 3

A department undertakes a curriculum review and redesign project. They visually map the existing curriculum, along with the rich array of resources and opportunitiies. This draws upon our expertise in Design Thinking, and a team of stduents (who have completed the Designing Change module). This visualisation is presented in the department's Academic Studio, as well as online. Design workshops are held with a broad range of participants, including alumni, local teachers, academics from other institutions (globally), and students. Alternative models for the new curriculum are designed and evaluate, with a successful candidate chosen and implemeted.

Example 4

A group of SMLC students research ways in which language learning in schools may be made more accessible and engaging. They design and "wireframe" an app. The design receives positive feedback from local schools. They successfully apply for a smal amount of seed funding, and create a new business to develop and market their invention. With the support of the Arts Faculty Coding Club they are able to build and deploy the app for download. It is successful, with hundreds of thousands of users in the UK and worldwide.

Example 5

An English Department student starts a blog in which they review every performance of a Shakespeare play in England for a whole year. This is a great success. They develop their work into a complete web site with supporting materials and contributions from other academics. This draws upon expertise in web design and our WordPress grooup. They then go on to complete an interdisciplinary PhD based on the website, with English, Computer Science, and the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies.

Example 6

A leading expert on community arts projects from Botswana spends an extended period of time as a visiting professor in the Faculty. They develop a virtual exchange programme between academics, students, and community groups in the West Midlands and Southern Africa. This includes developing a database of activities and resources, with a web site designed to give easy access for non-specialists. Community projects are developed to use these resources, and films created by participants working online internationally.

What capabilities are needed for this?

The same set of base capabilities are required for all types of activity (e.g. research, teaching, public engagement) and types of output (e.g. courses, performances, websites). The required tools, services, knowledge and skills must be present and easily accessed, but at the core of our community we need a common design-innovation process, each stage of which needs dedicated resources and specialised support and techniques. Our model for this process is based on a broad research base (see O'Toole, 2015), and observations of successful organisations (especially the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol). In his research on "The Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilties" David Teece shows how the continued success of creative, flexible, forward-moving organisations depends on processes and culture that enables all members of the organisation to:

  1. "sense" opportunities, connecting the affordances of tools, technologies and resources with needs, ambitions and values;
  2. "seize" opportunities, quickly mobilizing collaborations and organising projects so as to take action fast;
  3. "transform" practices, perceptions and knowledge so that innovations endure and enable further growth.

The green inner core of this diagram (below) represents a series of essential steps in this process. Defining goals, values, ambitions, intentions, and the form a project will take (whateve the output). Working out the detail of a design in a blueprint. Building the output. Operating the new design. Each of these stages requires ways of working, easy access to the required advice and support (being in a creative community is key to this), tools, spaces, resources, skills etc. In each of the examples described above, the protagonists may have stalled at an early stage, unable to seize upon the opportuniities and ambitions they have sensed. A thriving innovation community eases the search for a way forwards, through facilitated networking and open working practices. In many cases, the process of sensing opportunities simply fails to occur - this should not be left to chance, and needs to be fuelled through active showcasing and exercising the collective imagination.

The blue section in the diagram represents these "microfoundations" (Teece, 2007). A rich, well documented, easily experienced "platform" of tools, spaces, resources and skills drives imaginative experimentation, design and implementation. Note that this requires a continual formal service improvement and development function looking for gaps in provision and potential improvements (including forecastig emergent requirements and trends).

The intensive activity and development in the blue and green regions is good. But to make the most of it we need to enable active reflection, knowledge-building, and dissemination: research. This is represented in the yellow/red/orange/pink regions of the framework. We can divide this into pedagogic research and more general research activities (although in reality there may not be such a clear separation, with research and teaching being closely linked). Design and technology activities may generate new knowledge about design and tech itself (pink section) or be ued to enable research into the world beyond technology (purple section) - a distinction made by Christopher Frayling (1993). Our reputation as a world-leading organisation will be amplified and sustained by the quality of these research outputs.

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Frayling, Christopher (1993). “Research in art and design.” Royal College of Art, Research Papers, Volume 1, Number 1, London.

Teece, David (2007). "Explicating dynamic capabilities: The nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance." Strategic Management Journal. 28. 1319 - 1350. 10.1002/smj.640.