The Institute for Design Informatics, based in Edinburgh College of Art and School of Informatics, are proud to announce their joint participation in the Horizon Europe-funded project, CULTURAI. This ambitious four-year initiative, coordinated by KB National Library of the Netherlands, has secured €5 million in funding to safeguard human creativity and cultural diversity in the age of generative AI.

CULTURAI unites an international consortium of leading universities, cultural organizations, and research institutes, including the University of Edinburgh, Monash University, Delft University of Technology, and UNESCO, among others. The project aims to establish a virtual International Competence Centre by 2030 to support the responsible use of AI in cultural and creative sectors globally.

The Edinburgh team’s contributions focus on establishing Living Labs for prototyping new AI tools for creative and cultural industries with practitioners. The Living Labs are being set up in Edinburgh, The Hague, Prato and Zagreb, and will draw upon the Edinburgh team’s expertise in participatory innovation and convening creative industry participants to explore data and intelligence and its implications for these sectors.

Professor Frauke Zeller, co-director of the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, emphasized the project’s commitment to ensuring AI is developed and deployed in ways that enhance rather than hinder creative autonomy. “As AI transforms cultural industries, it’s crucial that we address issues of ethics, governance, and inclusivity to protect creative freedom”.

Fellow institute co-director Professor John Vines drew attention to the collaborative ethos of the project. “Over the last twelve years, design informatics has pioneered methods for engaging different audiences and communities to play with, question and redefine data and AI in their own terms. This needs a participatory and interdisciplinary mindset, and it’s exciting to see how the approaches we’ve developed in Edinburgh may travel and be radically adapted to be useful elsewhere in Europe”.

CULTURAI‘s objectives include developing responsible AI tools through innovative Living Labs, where creators from music, film, gaming, and digital storytelling as well as the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector, collaborate to design human-centered AI solutions. These efforts will provide essential insights and global benchmarking analyses to guide policymakers throughout Europe.

The Institute for Design Informatics is dedicated to advancing this collaboration, contributing its academic expertise to this critical global conversation. As part of this effort, the project seeks to establish governance frameworks and enhance AI literacy for cultural institutions worldwide.

The project is set to launch on 1 September 2026, with a 11 partner institutions from across Europe and South Africa: The Netherlands (KB National Library of the Netherlands, Delft University of Technology), Italy (Monash University European Research Foundation ETS and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), The United Kingdom (The University of Edinburgh), South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg), and Luxembourg (the University of Luxembourg). Other partners include UNESCO, Europeana Foundation (The Netherlands), IDEA Consult (Belgium) and Institute for Development and International Relations (Croatia).

For further information about the Institute for Design Informatics’s role in Project CULTURAI or to arrange interviews, please contact:

Prof. Frauke Zeller, fzeller@ed.ac.uk