Professor Yang Jiang - Inaugural Lecture

Creative Industries are one of the UK's most important sectors for growth, innovation and global influence. They include areas such as design, fashion, film, games, performance, museums, galleries, music, publishing, advertising, architecture and digital content. But Creative Industries are much more than an economic sector. They shape how we tell stories, remember places, express identities, engage audiences, build communities and imagine futures.

In this Inaugural Lecture, Professor Yang Jiang reflects on a research journey across Creative Industries, immersive design and collaborative research and development. Drawing on examples from her work, including AHRC-funded Augmented Fashion and European project IDEAL (Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship and Academic Learning for Creative Industries), the lecture explores how creativity, technology, real-world data, entrepreneurship and academic research can come together to create cultural, social and economic value.

The lecture will also show that immersive technologies are not only for entertainment, arts or cultural experiences. When combined with real-world data, 3D visualisation, simulation and game-like interaction can help people explore complex information, test future scenarios and understand systems that are difficult to see in everyday life.

Accessible to both specialist and general audiences, the lecture invites us to rethink Creative Industries as powerful spaces for collaboration, innovation and future-making, and to ask how universities, creative practitioners, cultural organisations, businesses, communities and wider partners can work together to build more sustainable creative futures.

About Professor Yang Jiang

Professor Yang Jiang is a Professor of Immersive Design in the School of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Education. Yang leads and co-leads multi-million pound cross-disciplinary research portfolios, collaborating with researchers, communities and sectors from completely different backgrounds.

She is the principal investigator for Augmented Fashion: Immersive Interactions for Sustainable Heritage in Fashion and Textile, a value of £1.3 million Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UKRI-funded project.

Her research and teaching interests are mainly in 3D visualisations, Immersive Technologies, computer gaming and computer-generated 3D character animations, as well as real-time motion capture. She collaborates with artists and creative media industries on 3D visualisations to create interesting animation characters; reconstruct events from videos to enrich computer animations; 3D visualisations for GIS; new games and user-centred designs in the Human-Computer Interaction Area.