Introduction to School

The School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) presents itself as an innovative university project in the Portuguese context and in the European space of higher education.

It is aimed at the development of education at all levels of higher education, degrees, master’s degrees and doctoral programmes, and for which it offers diplomas recognized in a wide area of consolidated knowledge and new fields of study. Fully organized according to the rules of the Bologna Treaty, ECATI is a pioneering organic unity in Portugal in articulating in the same scientific, educational and experimental space the studies in:

Communication and Humanities
Architecture, Arts and Design;
Multimedia, Cinema and Video;
Computer and Information Systems Engineering

The training strategy of ECATI, highly articulated, accurate and integrated, creates the necessary and indispensable conditions for students to respond creatively to the challenges arising from the information and knowledge society. The increasing trend towards globalization discourages the artificial separation of the technological and vocational training, the training in various fields of communication sciences as well as the training in arts and design, the training in information systems and architecture, having as ultimate goal creating a set of unique synergies in the national context. Its core objective is to provide students with skills that enable their autonomy and the creation of new knowledge, having shown so far as a place of great entrepreneurship. Without ever losing sight of the specificity of each field of knowledge, ECATI is a very wide educational space which provides different complementary knowledge, both horizontally, among the various studies cycles of the same level, and vertically, in the possibility of integrating its students in the various degrees conferred. Its students get an education that enables them to address, in an excellent fashion, an increasingly competitive and extended space as is Europe, not forgetting, however, to provide students with knowledge that enables them to have an intervention in the Lusophone space.

ECATI combines graduate and advanced training, research and the provision of services to the community, the support to professionalization and also the promotion of cultural and scientific activities, always trying to match them with the civil society needs.

An example of this is the existence within it of a Creative and Technological Incubator – PLAY – Projects Lab Alliance for You

To achieve its objectives, ECATI has a team of highly qualified teachers and who are permanently under training programes, as well as three research centers accredited by the Foundation for Science and Technology: Cic.Digital/CICANT, Copelabs e LabArt, that cover the different scientific fields of its training. The School has three scientific journals, Caleidoscópio: Revista de Comunicação e Cultura, Kino – international journal of film and media arts e Revista de Lusófona de Arquitectura e Educação.

ECATI makes available for the various activities appropriate space and equipment which are among the most advanced in the country.

Internationalization is a central axis of development of the ECATI project as can be seen through the existence of more than two hundred Erasmus mobility agreements for students and teachers with different institutions of the European space, because ECATI is the international coordinator of the only Erasmus Mundus European master’s degree already approved by the European Commission for our country under the new European framework, the master’s degree “Kino Eyes – the European Movie Masters”.

Erasmus + ref. 553676-EPP-1-2014-1-PT-EPPKA1-JMD-MOB, whose associated institutions are the Edingburgh Napier University and the Baltic Film School; and because ECATI is the coordinating institution of several European training and research projects, particularly the H2020 ResponSeable project and the Knowledge Alliances project, Ciakl II. For all these reasons, ECATI is today an internationally recognized and prestigious school, and the projects of its students are widely spread in the most varied international forums and the quality of its graduates is widely recognized by dozens of entities that contact us every year within the framework of different recruitment processes. ECATI is composed of four departments: