EPIC-WE

EPIC-WE – Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments

EPIC-WE develops and delivers a cultural innovation ecosystem in the form of Cultural Hubs and Cultural Game Jams that enable creative industries, cultural organisations, higher education institutions and young people to enter into transformative partnerships that bridges the domains of culture and games.

EPIC-WE introduces Cultural Game Jams, game-making as a sort of culture-making and games through and for culture as a novel approach to engage and empower young people as co-creators of European culture. The backbone of the project is the EPIC-WE Quadruple Helix Cultural Innovation Ecosystem along with its enactment in Cultural Living Labs or Cultural Hubs where creative industries, cultural organisations, higher education institutions and young people work closely together to foster cross-sector cultural innovation by bridging the domains of games and culture.

EPIC-WE develops and delivers models, processes, methods and tools for the execution of Cultural Hubs and Cultural Game Jams that support and promote young people to create games through and for culture inspired by cultural heritage. The project explores the potentials of the EPIC-WE ecosystem as a method for manifesting the value of cultural heritage, cultural-creative partnerships and culture-making in fostering empowered participation for youth in culture. Here, Cultural Game Jams is developed and tested as an innovative approach to develop cultural engagement, creativity and participation through the use of game-making processes, methods and tools that strengthens European values, belonging and cultural participation. Through cultural game-making activities, EPIC-WE aims to equip young citizens with cultural-creative imagination and competencies to engage cultural and societal challenges with curiosity, creativity, agency and imagination – what we call Empowered Participation. To achieve this, partners in culture, creative industries, research and higher education will work together to include youth 1) as empowered culture-makers through their participation in culture and their game jamming with cultural heritage, 2) as empowered co-creators of cultural innovation through their partnership with experts and professionals from culture, creative industries, research and higher education in Cultural Living Labs, 3) as empowered game-makers through their participation in Cultural Game Jams and their creation of games through and for culture.

EPIC-WE is carried out as an ambitious Design-Based Research and Innovation (DBR) project with 12 partners across 3 European sites, where EPIC-WE ecosystem actors co-create, and through this, develop, implement and evaluate the proposed framework of Cultural Hubs and Cultural Game Jams. The validated DBR innovations are presented as online and accessible resources that enable organisations across Europe to adopt and adapt the EPIC-WE Quadruple Helix Cultural Innovation Ecosystem, Cultural Hubs, and Cultural Game Jams. The project consortium is itself carried out through quadruple helix partnerships practiced in living labs for cultural innovation and tested through 12 game jams with young people.