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This paper discusses the findings of research conducted between 2013 and 2016, which concerned the development of technology roadmaps for the Creative Industries. The roadmap presented in this paper was built based on input from communities of creative and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) experts collected during the consultation and validation phases of the research. It provides a synthesis of challenges and recommendations from the five creative sectors examined by the project – Architecture, Art, Design, Games, Media and e-Publishing – and proposes research directions for the development of desired future technologies, by highlighting innovative future developments in the Creative Industries, while also assessing their technology maturity in the short, medium and longer terms. By rating the desired technologies as ‘present’ (1–2 years), ‘possible’ (2--5 years), or ‘probable’ (5–10 years or beyond), the roadmap gives orientation towards the development of new technologies and related business models and skills and provides guidance for informed policy-making. The paper thus aims at enabling stakeholders – creators, professionals, SMEs, creative groups, creative communities, associations, organisations and institutions, as well as governments and policy makers – to maximise their benefit and the societal value from the new emerging technology landscape in the Creative Industries.

The soul is an elusive thing, and anyone who wants to describe it must do so with metaphors, painting it in a picture of words. A geography of inside and outside, of walls and boundaries, is the expression in metaphor of a conception of human beings as creatures whose essence is the capacity for deceit and self-deception. Can we tear down the walls of this defamatory self-conception, this portrayal of the natural condition of persons as being one of hiding? With its rich fictional menagerie of angels and ghosts, daemons, witches, and specters, talking bears and impersonal but sentient matter, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials invites us to do just that.

Vassilopoulou discusses Plotinus' educational practice as it may be reconstructed from his biography and texts. She concentrates on Plotinus' views on the role of women manifested in his revision of traditional metaphors that accentuate women's dependent status, the overall significance of the employment of metaphors within a philosophical context, and the ensuing conception of dialectic and rationality. Her analysis indicates that Plotinus' practice of teaching and learning philosophy reflects contemporary feminist values. Her claim is that a reading of Plotinus from a feminist perspective has much to contribute to contemporary debates raised in the context of feminist pedagogy and theory.