In European society, video games are important both as a cultural and commercial industry and as an important aspect of people's daily lives. When compared to other economic sectors, the EU's video game market exhibits a rapid growth rate and makes up one-third of the total market value. The overall aim of the i-Game project is to create an accessible open-source game development platform that will facilitate the co-creation of games by diverse actors within different ecosystems of cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI), to enhance innovation and to bring positive impact on social cohesion and sustainability. More specifically, i-Game aspires: 1) To engage video game stakeholders of different abilities, expertise, and disciplines, to contribute, learn, share and tap into new innovative and economic opportunities; 2) To provide a collaborative platform with the tools to co-create mobile and virtual reality games by engaging different users, from different backgrounds and sectors; 3) To develop an ethical-design culture in the video game industry; 4) To monitor, assess and manage the impact that the video games have on different sectors, especially targeting culture/museums, creative industries and fashion/textile; 5) To help understand why and how are online games positively impacting people, culture and society and help extract the ingredients necessary for developing a new generation of games targeted to improve people’s well-being. The i-Game partnership, composed by organisations with diversified backgrounds and expertise, reassures the interdisciplinary approach required to address the complex topic of the games’ impact on innovation, sustainability, social cohesion and economic growth. This multi-sectorial and inclusive cooperation shall stimulate an innovative and productive work and inspire cross-fertilisation across perspectives, disciplines and countries, under common European values.

STITCH aims to transform our approach to vanishing textile cultural heritage and its craft into opportunities to educate and inspire future design. In the industrial world, textiles are cheap and mass produced, and as a consequence, traditional textile craft skill and knowledge are not always valued, and often forgotten. The market for such work thus becomes even more restricted, which results in the diminution of traditional textile craft and a loss of knowledge. With this diminution, an important piece of heritage is lost – not only the garments themselves but the methods of producing them and the intangible cultural manifestations of a community’s traditional dress. STITCH will create an open space for this important interplay between heritage, education and modern design via innovation within the process of safeguarding traditional dress and via an innovative learning programme for current fashion and textile students. Techniques that are typically not used in the classrooms will be brought forward by STITCH making full use of available technologies. Teachers will be joined by artesian educators and craftspeople through webinars to impart more practical courses. This will enable students’ access to knowledge, which is normally not part of the University training. A link between generations will be created and a sense of understanding, appreciation and respect will be formed. This will enrich the official and regulated training of design studies, providing new perspectives, knowledge and new ways of doing and creating by favoring the conservation of artistic and cultural heritage, which is one of the fundamental objectives of higher artistic education.STITCH will prove possible to develop and deliver a hands-on course of design studies in an online manner serving as predecessor for other practical design studies. Specifically, STITCH focuses on:•CATALOGUING INTANGIBLE HERITAGE: This includes the skills, the tools and the history of production and the events, traditions and social history associated with each heritage costume. The project emphasizes the need to preserve and share the living textile heritage of European communities when cataloguing traditional dress in museums or cultural centres. •DIGITAL INNOVATION: It will use 3D scanning and film to improve the documentation of historical dress and facilitate the teaching of traditional textile and garment making techniques.•TEXTILE HERITAGE EDUCATION: There is a need to amplify the opportunities for inspiration and conditions for innovation resulting from traditional textiles and their craftsmanship. As education is the ‘strongest tool in preservation of heritage’ participating HEIs will assume a role within safeguarding and continuing textile heritage.As a result of these innovations STITCH aims to drive the improved safeguarding of European textile heritage and its continued role in the modern world of textile design and production. Multiplier events, stakeholder engagement as well as seminars will support the correct dissemination of project results as well as knowledge transfer between participating organisations.

The European textile industry has always been keen to preserve representative examples of textile production of the past, either for creative or for educational purposes. Numerous collections of antique and exotic textiles, today preserved in museums, have come from the private collections of textile entrepreneurs or industrial institutes and schools. Many firms have also acquired whole archives or textile samples from other sources.Over the last few decades, the economic crisis which has affected the European textile sector has resulted in the loss of many textile archives. Indeed the failure of businesses and the consequent closure of their warehouses has caused the loss of hundreds of textile samples and designs. In order to avoid breaking the line of continuity which joins past and future textile production - a fundamental feature of European excellence in the fashion sector - it is necessary for museums, cultural institutions and textile companies to protect our textile heritage.The project objective is to both to contribute to the protection and exploitation of the fashion Cultural Heritage and organize and structure it in vocational training courses for the improvement of EU fashion designers (Fashion designers working in T&A Industries and young fashion designers). The purpose of the developed curricula is to train EU fashion designers to improve their designs and achieve an increased added value of their garments, by achieving precious knowledge about the past and current state of fashion. Work-based training ICT tools based on fashion cultural heritage is missing from European fashion industry which needs inspiration and learning from a glorious past in order to add value to its products and boost its competitiveness internationally. The platform created encompasses design skills, concentrating information and digitalized material from the Prato Textile Museum. More specifically, the results reached out by the project can be summarize as follows:1. The enhancement of knowledge, skills and competences of fashion designers. This result is achieved taking into account the several people involved in the project, either during the multiplier events and in the different opportunities where the project was further disseminated.2. The engagement of fashion industry personnel in the lifelong learning in a non-formal, business setting, based on experiential, work-based, problem-based and self-directed learning, and a learning outcomes approach. Many designers, students and young professionals have now the opportunity to further explore the ART-CHERIE platform and develop their skills in a continuous way.3. The definition and development of a Curriculum for the VET as an European Standard, including a qualification framework. The curricula framework developed throughout the project duration is a self-learning curriculum (7 ECTs) focusing on the professional designers or students in their last year of their BA education. It represents about 80% of what would be required to conform with 7 ECTS. Moreover, partners also developed 2 training courses - womenswear and embroidery, freely accessible in the ART-CHERIE platform.4. The establishment of a digital training platform, bringing together fashion designers across Europe, provide online training and facilitate dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experience. In a moment where Digitalization is key for the T&C sector, the ART-CHERIE platform is a good example of how T&C professionals can have free access to digitalized materials and information to further develop their own activities and creations. It is also important to mention that SMEs can benefit from this project by modernising their activities through the use of a high quality ICT Tool and being more inspired by the large Prato T&C heritage digitalized (not completely) in our platform.5. The improvement and extension of high quality learning opportunities tailored to the needs of fashion designers, operating within the entire spectrum of fashion industries. Both the curricula framework and the courses available in the ART-CHERIE platform constitute a good source of learning activities for T&C professionals. In terms of its content, it is important to mention that it has been managed by the entirely partnership, including the industry representatives (EURATEX and HCIA).6. The achievement of an effective and tangible quality development of EU fashion industry’s competitiveness and internationalisation of their work and personnel.The project involves 5 partners from 4 EU countries, all with a long established vocation on T&C productions and a significant tradition in design and creativity. Coherently with the nature of the project, the partnership is composed by Business Associations, T&C museum, organizations supporting T&C businesses, University and NGO active in ICT technological tools development.

RECHARGE is about participation and the value of cultural heritage and its institutions. RECHARGE is about participation and the value of cultural heritage and its institutions. Emerging from the pandemic, the role played by many CHIs in keeping citizens engaged and mentally healthy through a variety of creative initiatives is widely acknowledged; however, this was also a time of financial loss. Turning that creativity into money that keeps the institution afloat is the challenge RECHARGE is set to answer. Participation is core to the value proposition of cultural heritage institutions and can be the means through which communities - whether corporates, citizens or other CHIs - become CHIs’ stakeholders. RECHARGE will set up an iterative and intrinsically participatory environment -the Living Labs- as means to co-create and prototype participatory business models. The consortium will actively document and analyse this process, which will result in economic measures of effectiveness, indicators of sustainability and participation, museologic reprofiling of social and cultural spaces, cultural and social valuation, and managerial development of participatory business models. Combining both rigorous academic research and hands-on analysis through the Living Lab, RECHARGE will deliver a Playbook containing the ingredients and recipes that can be adapted to local environments to create participatory business models for their communities. The online Knowledge Base, populated with research results, will support the uptake in the sector and among interested communities, while the Academy will engage the CHI networks and build capacity to make a real difference in the landscape of CHIs. RECHARGE boasts a multidisciplinary team bringing together different university departments, independent research organizations and CHI representatives from six EU countries. Together, we will make the CH sector more resilient and better equipped to deal with future challenges and transitions