Caitlin McDonald’s focus with Design Informatics is supporting innovation for cultural and creative industries policy across Europe for the Ekip policy engine. Ekip is a partnership of 17 universities, private sector organisations, and policymaking bodies all around Europe designed to help innovation ecosystems for the creative industries flourish through new insights and networks.

She previously helped the arts, design and cultural sectors innovate by leveraging the power of data and technology for the Creative Informatics programme. In 2024 her artwork “Picture Your Poisons” was presented at the Edinburgh Science Festival and Visual Arts Scotland centenary show, educating thousands of people about the material origins of different breast cancer treatments. In 2023 she published “Detecting Dark Matter Data,” a white paper designed to help policy practitioners, industry professionals working in the creative industries, and data platforms working with creative industries data (eg. ticketing data) to take practical steps towards improving the processing, storage, and use of creative industries data for making decisions about the sector. She received a Turing Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for research on climate-related risks to Edinburgh’s intangible cultural heritage in 2022; read more in her Edinburgh Innovations case study.

Caitlin is an award-winning researcher, an artist whose work has been featured in international digital art exhibitions, and a strategist with 10+ years’ experience across the private and public sectors researching and advising on sociotechnical impacts. Caitlin’s PhD (2011, University of Exeter) examined how information flows for cultural bodies of knowledge like dance are impacted by technoscapes (the digital world around us.)