In the context of unprecedented digital acceleration, the design of innovative, open and alternative, reasoned and sustainable editorial software tools requires a joint and ambitious reflection that ESAD is pleased to be able to develop as part of the first stage of the EPE research project, supported by European funding from Creative Europe from December 2023 to December 2025.

The EPE project was set up with the research unit designing tools, tools for design at ESAD GV (École Supérieure d‘Art et Design de Grenoble/Valence), in collaboration with the Hexagone arts & sciences national stage (Grenoble), Esisar (Valence School of Embedded Systems Engineering, INPG) and Pagora (School of Paper and Printed Communication Engineering, INPG), and now has a European, international and interdisciplinary dimension. It brings together the graphic design departments of a consortium made up of the universities of Sfax (visual design department, 4C research centre/Tunisia), Zagreb (Faculty of Graphic Arts/Croatia), and Izmir (İzmir University of Economics, Department of Visual Communication Design, Turkey) around a necessary, ambitious, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral project.

The expansion of digital tools, such as websites, writing engines like ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence, together with the growing understanding of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the wars that mark our current times, are having an impact on the ‘human action’ and the Earth, which are redefining our relationship to the environment, Europe and the world. This redefinition has given rise to new narratives and artistic forms. On national stages and in museums, artists are now deploying original, immersive interactive hybrid devices (immersive sound, video mapping, augmented reality, virtual reality) that use digital creativity to tell the complex story of our present world.

But digital acceleration does not impact all generations in the same way, and there is still a wide diversity of uses. To reach and develop inter-generational audiences, such artistic forms need to be communicated through appropriate and creative content and media, whether printed, digital or audio-visual. In the cultural organisations, between paper and digital, a coherence of tools and global communication strategy is struggling to be implemented.

At the same time, we are witnessing the hegemony of editorial practices: printouts of online content are taken over by limited browsers with no real choice of page layout. Creative work, art and design schools and professional practices in all sectors, particularly cultural, are thus constrained by proprietary publishing software tools (Adobe in particular) which dominate the graphic and editorial chain. Public programmes lead students to become dependent on such proprietary tools, which are closed, expensive and used by a labour market that would love to do without them... but can‘t find anyone trained in alternative tools. Ultimately, open source tools would represent a lighter financial burden for young professionals. Moreover, by definition, these tools take into account ecological issues by enabling a fine-tuned selection of what is to be published on paper.

At the crossroads of the professions, the arts and the professional branches of culture, EPE sees itself as a conceptual and practical toolbox for designing new publishing software under an open licence produced with the aim of alternative and creative communication between screen and paper. Building on existing initiatives, EPE aims to imagine a set of new editorial tools that will liberate digital creation. It is part of an ‘open’ approach to digital technology that encourages more independent use and easier, less costly reproduction. What is at stake here is the accessibility of content, from screen to paper, as well as a long-term revolution in the entire editorial graphics chain: from education to the profession of graphic designer, redefined through a more creative and fluid collaboration with paper and IT engineers.