Research

Throughout Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, we have supported a variety of academic research that has fitted alongside, and in conversation with, the work of our funded teams of artists, makers, thinkers, and businesses.

Some of this work has been carried out by independent researchers, and other examples have been collaborations between our creative community and universities. Our goal was to connect the rich seams of research happening both inside and outside the university together to help support the creative sector.

Examples include:

• Dr Malu Villela and Dr Alice Willatt (University of Bristol) explored how creative businesses might move from shareholder-owned models to community-owned ones. You can read more about Malu and Alice's research here.

• Dr Liz Roberts (UWE Bristol) explored how policymakers and stakeholders were tackling the need for change in how we organise and govern our creative sector. Responsibility for making the sector more resilient, fairer, environmentally sustainable, and inclusive cannot and should not fall exclusively on creative businesses and individuals; there are many structures at play which both create opportunities and barriers to change. Read more about Liz's research here.

• Dr Tarek Virani (UWE Bristol) conducted research into what makes creative and cultural businesses resilient to shocks like the pandemic, and has developed a toolkit to help businesses assess their readiness for such challenges. He developed a toolkit for creative businesses to explore their own resilience. Explore the tookit here.

• B+B-funded PhD student Anca Salagean worked across the University of Bath’s CREATE Lab and CAMERA to undertake multi-disciplinary research into personalised, photorealistic avatars.
  

• Bringing together current advances in psychological research and computer vision, a research team from the University of Bath and University of Bristol developed Trace, a web-based media player with motion tracking capabilities, which they could use to test 200+ international participants during the months of world-wide lockdowns. The primary goal was to determine whether audience engagement could be measured through remote methods, and if so, how.

To find out more, you can visit our publications page to see what we've been up to.