Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology is busyplanning its digital media company incubator and future links with industry,writes Karlin Lillington.
Digital media, content creation, digital arts, computer animation - these are touted as areas of potential commercial excellence for the Republic.
But "potential" remains the operating word. While the State can boast some big players in the digital content and e-learning area already in Riverdeep and Smartforce (now SkillSoft), most ventures in the area are generally untried, fledgling game design, computer animation, web services and content companies.
Nonetheless, both Forfás and Enterprise Ireland have forefronted digital media - including the development of the Liberties digital district - as holding promise for future economic growth.
That's good news to the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology - or IADT, as students and staff prefer to call it. "We represent the meeting place of enterprise, creativity and technology," says Mr Jim Devine, IADT's director.
To that end, Enterprise Ireland recently has given the IADT €2.5 million to create a digital media company incubator for the Liberties digital hub project, on its Dún Laoghaire campus.
About 80 per cent of the facilities will support new companies, while the remaining 20 per cent will be used for contract research.
Mr Devine's comments may sound like a broad boast to anyone who hasn't gone out and looked around the place for a while.
Many tend to still think of the institute as having more of an arts focus - because it was initially established as the Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design. Yet even then, it was actually set up with a strong computing and arts focus, under the aegis of the institutes of technology, in 1997.
Since the move to become the State's sole institute for study in this merged zone of arts, media and technology, IADT has experienced fast growth and, eventually, the need to rethink itself.
Five years ago IADT had 450 students, a number that has now more than doubled to 1,300.
In 1997, IADT had 13 lecturers and 30 computers in its e-graphics section, with students crawling along on dial-up internet access.
Now, it features 40 lecturers in the area - with over 100 across the institute - and some 700 computers on a broadband connection.
A crucial step in an overall remake was reorganising the institute structurally to comprise three schools, of art, design and media; science and technology; and business and humanities.
"Students will actually do projects that fuse those disciplines together," explains Ms Aileen MacKeogh, head of the School of Art, Design and Media.
"We're mirroring much more what's going on in industry." IADT spoke to 39 companies as it drew up its new course design, she said, though she stresses the commercial sector doesn't drive the courses, either, it just helps keep them grounded in a real approach to the digital media sectors.
On the tech end, hardware includes very high-end work stations and digital editing equipment that allows students to produce polished film and animation work that has consistently won national and international awards. IADT also was the Grand Prix winner and received the "Best College of Digital Media" award at the January O2 National Digital Media Awards.
IADT's facilities are heavily used - on a recent warm sunny morning during Easter break, one student filmmaker took advantage of the relative quiet and was busy doing some editing work in a computer studio. Another was practising make-up skills in a different building.
The institute offers the only professional make-up and special effects course in the country - teaching not department store salesperson skills, but how to create alarmingly real-looking wounds for film and television, among other things, as some gory snapshots pasted to one wall attest. Down another hall, a large room is packed full of rubber heads and limbs, many of them masks for hideous-looking aliens and monsters, often modelled on computers before being sculpted in three dimensions. Of such skills are the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films born.
"What's helped make all this possible is the "and Technology" in 'IADT'," says Mr Devine. "That's been the enabler." Students can focus on the digital media stream of instruction from their second year, but all come out of their college experience with technology literacy, he says.
While proud of where IADT is now, the institute faces some major challenges. Prime among these is to raise matching funding of €500,000 for the incubation centre, notes Ms Dipti Pandya, director of development. That's a big job for a school without the dedicated fund-raising staff that large universities would have.
Then, there's the practical challenge of keeping all-important hardware and software at the cutting edge. Ms MacKeogh notes that the State tends to fund such equipment as a once-off expense, ignoring its relatively brief shelf-life.
A few years on, and much will need replacing. Long-term shunning of this problem is why "science in Ireland is creaking," says Mr Devine.
However, those issues will be dealt with as they arise, he says. For now, IADT is busy planning for its incubator building, and a future it hopes will see it partnering in some innovative ways with industry.
