Digital Skills for the Creative Practitioner: Supporting Informal Learning of Technologies for Creativity

The creative industries play an important role in economic, cultural and social life, and in many creative disciplines much of the workforce is made up of individual practitioners including freelancers, sole traders and small or micro enterprises. These talented creatives often need to be responsible for their own ongoing learning within challenging and ever-evolving digital and technological domains. Whether their creative practice is primarily analogue or digital, Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) and digital platforms are being adopted for use in many phases of the creative production and dissemination process. By necessity, much of the learning that creatives undertake during the adoption of technologies is self-directed, informal, and often involves peer-to-peer support. This is an important contextual factor that HCI research needs to address when developing tools and support systems for this user group. This one-day workshop will bring together participants from the HCI, creative and educational communities to discuss and share knowledge of technology learning and skills acquisition for working creatives. The workshop aims to examine ideas, strategies and experiences around supporting digital literacy, competency and confidence. The goal is to develop further collaborative research addressing support structures and frameworks in the area of informal learning about digital creativity tools for working practitioners.