Grounding, principles and method

Digital creative literacy is the body of knowledge, know-how and dispositions that allows a person to critically receive, understand, imagine, make, publish and capitalise on content and projects in digital environments — autonomously, ethically and sustainably.

As reading, writing and arithmetic were to the civilisation of print, it constitutes a foundation: a body of knowledge society has an interest in seeing widely shared, and which can be mapped, observed and measured by levels — without anyone being expected to master all of it. CreaComp is that map.

CreaComp offers an integrated framework describing a person's capacity to understand digital environments, to create in them intentionally, to turn ideas into finished work, to engage with communities and to build lasting autonomy around what they make.

Taken on its own, none of these dimensions is unprecedented, and the framework does not claim otherwise. Searching for and evaluating information, understanding platforms and artificial intelligence, creativity, digital production, collaboration, audience building, running projects, entrepreneurship, intellectual property and value creation are already described elsewhere — by DigComp, by EntreComp, by media and information literacy, by research on creativity, by various models of digital competence.

What is original in CreaComp lies in its overall architecture rather than in any of its components taken separately. It gathers into one model, with a common grammar of levels and consistent evidence of assessment, dimensions that are usually studied and assessed apart from one another. That integration is the defensible claim, and it is what empirical validation has to put to the test.

In its classical scientific use, a literacy denotes a body of knowledge and capacities enabling someone to understand, interpret, use and produce forms of information and communication. The rubrics Gather, Analyse, Create, and part of Make, fit that definition without strain: they describe a reading and a production of forms.

The difficulty begins with the downstream rubrics. Negotiating an agreement, running a project, testing a business model, growing an activity, building resources independent of the platforms, organising a collective: these capacities exceed the classical notion of literacy. Calling them literacy would stretch the word until it lost its precision — and precision is exactly what gives it scientific value.

A broader notion would hold the whole together: digital creative agency. Agency denotes a person's capacity to act intentionally on their environment rather than merely undergo it. Applied to the digital, it covers understanding systems, making informed decisions within them, creating, turning those creations into concrete action, and drawing a form of autonomy from them.

The articulation between the two notions is simple, and that is what makes it fruitful: literacy allows one to understand and to produce; agency allows one to act, to organise and to transform. Digital creative literacy then becomes one of the foundations of digital creative agency, not its equivalent.

This distinction is a line of work, developed in the scientific writing that accompanies the framework; it does not change the project's public terminology. CreaComp remains the framework for digital creative literacy, and will remain so while the notion of agency is being built: the aim is to add theoretical depth, not to rename the framework with every hypothesis.

The dominant digital economy captures attention: it optimises time spent, reflexive engagement, consumption endured rather than chosen. CreaComp argues for a shift: from an attention economy, in which people are the extracted resource, to an intention economy, in which they become authors again — of what they read, what they create and what they build.

Every domain of the framework can be reread through that shift: understanding algorithms not in order to flatter them but in order to choose what you feed; building a community you own rather than an audience you rent; creating with AI by directing it, rather than by delegating your judgement to it.

Generative artificial intelligence has collapsed the cost of production: a competent text, a clean visual, an edited video are becoming universally accessible. What becomes ordinary loses its value; value moves towards both ends of the creative chain. Upstream: the eye — knowing what to create, why, and from which point of view. Downstream: the relationship — trust, community, and the ability to turn attention received into assets owned.

This reading does not change the architecture of the framework, which remains a complete map; it is its reading key. It explains why the upstream domains (Gather, Analyse, Create) and the downstream ones (Collaborate, Monetise) weigh as much as making itself.

The framework is organised into seven domains of action — named with verbs — each gathering four competencies, and crossed by three transversal threads. Every competency is described at four levels, giving 124 observable descriptors (28 competencies and 3 threads, multiplied by 4 levels), each paired with evidence of assessment.

The levels describe postures, not ages: they apply identically to every competency, which is what gives the framework its internal coherence. The school markers are indicative.

They follow a single axis — autonomy, the complexity of the situations handled, the capacity to orchestrate. Practice moves from guided to independent in familiar situations, then to adaptation and arbitration in complex ones, and finally to the design of systems: combining several competences, deciding under uncertainty and, where relevant, increasing the capacity of a collective.

This is therefore not a scale of "doing the same thing better and better". Nor does it confuse mastery of a competency with the ability to teach it: an excellent creator need not be a teacher, and no Orchestration descriptor requires training anyone. Where a collective appears, it is because the competency itself is about collective work.

As it stands, CreaComp is an open framework under development and scientific validation. Its construction — the choice of seven rubrics, the division into thirty-one entries, the grammar of four levels, the writing of one hundred and twenty-four descriptors — proceeds from analysis and comparison with existing frameworks, carried out along the seven guiding principles set out above. No study has yet measured how it behaves with real cohorts.

Separating the theoretical proposal from its empirical validation is not a token precaution: it is what makes the framework arguable, criticisable, testable and correctable. A framework presenting itself as already validated would offer no purchase for criticism, and would have nothing to gain from a study that proved it wrong.

CreaComp is a new framework, built on an object of its own: digital creative literacy. It neither extends nor subordinates itself to an existing framework. The European competence frameworks — DigComp for the digital competence of citizens, EntreComp for entrepreneurial competence — were its inspiration and its working basis, and they remain its natural complement. The overlaps with them are real and acknowledged: what sets CreaComp apart is not that it covers dimensions nobody has described, but that it articulates them within a single model.

What CreaComp deliberately leaves out, it leaves out as a matter of scope, not by deferring to an outside authority. It covers neither device and account security, nor defensive personal-data protection, nor technical problem-solving, nor office software and administrative communication. Those belong to a general digital literacy that is well served elsewhere, and duplicating them would have diluted the point. CreaComp assumes them available and deals exclusively with the creative side: understanding systems, conceiving, making, addressing, venturing, capitalising.

Three points of contact with general digital literacy deserve to be made explicit, because CreaComp goes further than it does at each. Competency 1.2 (reliability and manipulation) pushes critical reading as far as detecting synthetic content and the influence techniques specific to creative spaces. Competency 5.3 (conduct online) reaches moderation and the public handling of criticism. Competency 7.4 (platform-independent assets) treats data as property — owning your audience and your work — where the usual defensive approach stops at protecting it.

Finally, media and information literacy — a formal part of the French school curriculum — finds its natural extension in the Gather domain: CreaComp offers MIL teachers a trajectory leading from critical reception, their territory, towards assumed creation, which is its own.