MA in Creative Industries

Our approach to this field

Creativity is considered quite a desirable commodity in our contemporary culture. Creativity – economists and government officials maintain – is necessary to innovate, and innovation leads to economic prosperity. Yet, what does it mean to be creative? What are creative products?

The creative industries are a dynamic and complex field that changes rapidly due to globalisation and the continual development of new and exciting technologies. At Radboud University we look at many areas of the creative industry, such as:

• Fashion: Fashion is a commercial, creative and cultural industry producing and consuming material objects like textiles and garments, but also more immaterial values like trends, images, meaning, desire, experience and (beauty) ideals. The glamour of fashion may lure us, but it is the most polluting industry after the oil industry. The field is dominated by incredible speed, rapid turnover, and high waste. Can the fashion industry retain its glamour, but become more sustainable?
• Media: The contemporary mediascape is dominated by global conglomerates that own companies in various industries, such as film studios, theme parks, television networks, sports and news channels, record labels, publishing houses, and game developers. As a result, the industry has transformed into a cultural economy where only six ‘media giants' - including Disney and Time Warner - control 90% of everything we read, watch or listen to. We will look at how the media industry shapes both the form and the content of contemporary media productions.
• Education: Creativity and the so-called ‘21st Century Skills' in education are skills that are important for contemporary post-industrial societies. It is also people’s urge to learn and increase their ‘cultural intellect’ is also used to promote products. For example, museums are becoming a lot more interactive to help visitors understand their content better.

Challenges experts of the creative industries face

Our approach to Creative Industries is both theoretical and pragmatic. In this Master’s specialisation, we look at the larger and smaller players in the field of creative industries, from global conglomerates right down to one-man/woman companies. We have a look at the challenges they may face. These challenges include:

1. Trying to determine what will happen in the future. As a future expert in Creative Industries you will learn to analyze and predict the trends in the field itself: from practical questions like what influence the iPhone may have on fashion, to more general questions like how can culture bring together communities or how can the creative industries invest in values of beauty, quality, and meaning-making.
2. Trying to make the field more sustainable. In Creative Industries, trends move at a surprisingly fast pace. Tomorrow’s must-have will be old next week. Is it possible to slow trends down in the fast-changing globalised world? Or can we introduce slowness as the new trend?

Specialisations

Creative Industries is a specialisation of the Master’s programme in Arts and Culture. The other English-taught specialisation is:

• Tourism and Culture

Career prospects

If you want to make a career in the area where art meets commerce, where highbrow meets lowbrow, and where elite meets public, the Master’s specialisation in Creative Industries will definitely suit your interests.

Skills

This Master’s will help you develop the reflective, inquisitive and critical attitude you need to succeed in this field, while closely looking at research methods and discussions currently surrounding these topics. You will familiarise yourself with policy papers, business plans, scripts for the future, advanced knowledge of the industries based on the creative product. You will also be able to assess future trends, especially where the industry is concerned. In short, you will have the skills you need to contribute to the development of the young and dynamic creative sector.

Job positions

The jobs you might find yourself doing after graduating from this programme are extremely varied. The terrain of creative industries is as diverse as it is big and it’s continually expanding, creating lots of new potential jobs. We, therefore, expect there will be more and more demand for people with expertise in the creative industries.

To give you an idea of possible jobs, here a sample of jobs our graduates are now doing:

• Trend watcher for companies
• Consultant art education for an educational organisation
• Consultant ‘quality television’ for a national commercial television station
• Cultural policy-maker for the government
• Festival organizer
• Webmaster at a museum
• Programme organizer at a film festival

Creative Industries on TV!

The Dutch TV show Ondernemen doen we zo ('How we run our business') showcased our Master’s programme in Creative Industries in a broadcast on the creative industries. Former student Ricardo talked about the trend-watching company he launched after graduating.

Radboud Career Service

Radboud Career Service helps students with finding internships, gives career advice and can offer tips and guidance when applying for jobs.

Our research in this field

A small sample of research done at Radboud University in the field of Creative Industries:

Fashion and technology

Radboud University professor Anneke Smelik leads the interdisciplinary research project ‘Crafting Wearables’ which aims to design wearables that are robust and fashionable as well as commercially viable within the production chain. While the future of fashionable technology, or ‘wearables’, has been announced many times, the praxis lags behind. Wearables rarely leave the lab or catwalk, because they are not tested through the entire production chain; the aesthetics of the design is not integrated into the technology; or they remain a gadget without taking into account the wearer’s body, identity or performance. Through interrelated research projects, this interdisciplinary programme bridges the gap between theory and practice, experiment and industry, and design and production. As a result, the project will not only craft wearables but also analyze how fashionable technology relates to identity, comprehend its social impact, bring technology closer to fashion design, and make it a competitive branch of the creative industry in the Netherlands.

Sonic Interaction

Radboud University lecturer Vincent Meelberg does research into the relationship between sound and interaction. Human beings interact with each other by using sound, such as speech. Making music is a form of sonic interaction as well. Devices such as alarms, mobile phones, and even cars communicate with their users through sound. In his research, Meelberg investigates these different forms of sonic interaction, by focusing on both everyday sounds and sounds that are the result of artistic practices, such as music, radio plays, and sound art. This research addresses issues such as the manners in which we use sound to interact, how sound codetermines the ways we experience environments and the ways in which artistic practices may teach us about how sound can affect us.

Vincent Meelberg is the founding editor of the Journal of Sonic Studies and has recently coedited a book on sounding art, called The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (Routledge 2017).

Media Industry

Martijn Stevens studies the social, cultural and organisational dimensions of multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration in the creative industries. It has frequently been argued that the creative industries are drivers of innovation and, additionally, that successful innovation is mostly done through relationships. A culture of ‘collaborative commitment’ is therefore crucial. However, the creative industries are also highly ambivalent and institutionally complex due to the simultaneous coexistence of conflicting discourses and divergent frames of reference, which often causes dissonance and disruption in the creative process. As a consequence, innovation is not necessarily a comfortable or enjoyable undertaking. Special attention should, therefore, be paid to enhancing mutual trust and respect.

Besides a keen interest in cross-disciplinary research, Martijn Stevens is also passionately fond of creating a learning environment that fosters joint experimentation and interdisciplinary thinking. He has therefore been involved in several projects that were aimed at encouraging the mutual exchange between students working across the fields of art, science and the humanities.