A Communication project
By Benoy Thoompunkal, Diector Academics
As you all know the ARCH Academy of Design & Perth College, UHI, Scotland, have been jointly awarded the prestigious 45,000 GBP UKIERI 2012 grant for Institutional Capacity Building. The grant is to be used towards funding the planned implementation and activities of the project titled “Communication and Application of Design to Promote Mutual Creative & Cultural Industries”.
ARCH Director Archana Surana and I started off the collaborative project by making the first visit to institutional partner Perth College, UHI in Scotland, in the preliminaries towards rationalizing, scheduling and structuring the contents of all the parts and intended activities of the project, as also to get a firsthand experience of the visible culture, heritage and creative components of the Scottish Creative & Cultural Industries. Both partners would be sending their project team members for periodic visits to each others institutions over the next 2 years towards enabling completion of all proposed & planned outcomes of the project which includes building an Online Portal for training members of their respective Creative Industries.
The visit was very successful in terms of the experience of a culture and its history & the achievement of agreeable cohesion of thought and intent between the individual partners in the collaborative effort.
Amidst the meetings and discussions, our hosts, Perth College, represented in the main 
by Ms. Christiana Margiotti, Subject & Programme Leader – Creative Arts & Technologies and Visual Design & Communications and Lorenze Cairns, Head of Curriculum, Creative Industries, had planned out a lovely itinerary to give us an effective picture of their country. The accompanying photographs should give you a fair idea of this! Christiana, in fact personally drove us to all the places she had planned into the itinerary; something we had never expected and therefore appreciated very deeply.
Representing Perth College, UHI in the project, Christiana will be visiting us in turn in the last week of October. We look forward to welcoming her to our country and taking the project further forward.